Office of Information Services - Application Programming
Date Entry & Searching -- Business and University Names July 13, 1998
Keep punctuation to an absolute minimum.
Periods are NEVER necessary.
Commas may be necessary for correct understanding, such as in Sanley, Vaughan, and Weaver Services Inc (note I did NOT put a comma before Inc)- but use them sparingly.
Limit abbreviations and never use them at the first of the name. We have a large number of duplicate ids because abbreviations were used when the name was put in and subsequent searches by name didn't show it - such as the CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY FRESNO which holds the record of 43 ids under various abbreviations CAL ST UNIV AT FRESNO, CALIF STATE UN - FRESNO, CAL STATE U FRESNO, etc. If you need more spaces on your screen where last name is entered, we will rearrange and give you more. Don't abbreviate KANSAS (or any other state) - there were lots of duplicate ids because somebody put in KS instead of spelling out KANSAS.
NEVER, NEVER, NEVER split a company name and put part of it in the last name field, part in the first name, etc. It should all be put in the last name field.
Most of the S E K, SE KS, S E KANSAS, SEK, etc., stuff has been changed to SOUTHEAST KANSAS. The exceptions are the companies where their name is obviously SEK rather than an abbreviated SOUTHEAST KANSAS - such as SEK-CAP. Be sure to do name search in a variety of ways when abbreviations and/or initials could have been previously used.
Subdepartments of universities (or any company for that matter) should be entered in the format UNIVERSITY NAME SUBDEPARTMENT - such as WICHITA STATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY not LIBRARY WICHITA STATE UNIVERSITY, or LIBR WICH ST UNIV, or LIB WSU.
For both cross referencing and lookup purposes, special characters are removed from the names, such as &,#,%,[spaces], etc. That means when you enter AT&T... it gets changed to ATT...