Using the Member Search on the WASFAA Web
by WASFAA Past-President Ted Malone,
Edmonds Community College

Some folks have had questions about using the search function on the WASFAA membership section of the web-site. This article will help you learn ways to use the database for more than just looking up a single person.

From the home page, select the "Membership" button on the left-hand side of the page. At this point, there are two choices: "Search the Membership Database" and "Membership Application". Select the "Search the Membership Database" option. You will receive a request for Name and Password. The answer for both is wasfaa (in lowercase). This will take you to a page that gives you some hints and tips on using the search feature, as well as two se-lections. One selection allows you to "Update or Correct Your Individual Listing". [Here is a secret. It does not actually update your information; it sends me an e-mail telling me you want your information updated.] The other selection is "SEARCH NOW!" which will take you to a page that looks like this:

The key to finding people or groups of people is thinking about what they have in common and by not being too se-lective in your search. For instance, someone called me and asked for help finding a person who worked in a law school in California, but couldn't remember the person's name. What we did was put "law" in the Institution field and "California" in the State field. This gave me a list of 19 names and from there we easily picked out the right person.

It's important to keep in mind that you do not need to answer every field. Sometimes that can create the problem. For example, you may be looking for someone at UCLA. However, depending on how that person completed their membership form, their institution might be under "UCLA" or "University of California at Los Angeles" or one of hun-dreds of other ways to abbreviate any of those words. Try dif-ferent variations. Let's say you want to find my e-mail address. You may not remember if I am listed under "Ted" or "Theodore", but if you searched for "T" in the First Name field and "Malone" in the Last Name field, you would find only me. In fact, I am the only Malone, so if you just searched by Malone in the Last Name field you would get me. If you did not know how I spelled my name, but knew I worked in the state of Washington, you could enter "T" in the First Name field, "M" in the Last Name field and "Washington" in the State field. You will get a list of nine people, but I'm easy to pick out from there.

It is also important to know that searches are not limited to first letters. So in my list of nine Washingtonians with Last Name field containing "M" and First Name field containing "T", some may start with neither. When you over-specify, it is easy to miss folks. If you include a hyphen in a name, but the database has it without one, then you would miss it. It is bet-ter to start small and work your way up. You can use this to get a list of all WASFAA members from your state by simply selecting the State field and nothing else. This is a nice tidy list if you are from Hawaii, but kind of unruly if you are from California.

So have fun and find some friends!