The philosophy of the directory has changed. Our earlier scheme had degenerated into chaos. Our directory records are 1,024 bytes each and we have about 50,000 entries. Several other systems on campus are sending updates too.
Users can change only a few fields in their entries.
We regularly rebuild the file using information from our official University human resources and student databases. We have been experimenting with ways to let users make changes to their entries from a Web browser with forms support. There is, of course, no warranty.