Tamkang University (TKU) will establish an academic database for full-time teachers. The database will collect their teaching, research, service and other information, even offer the function of inquiry. The collection work is underway and the database is expected to be available in September 2003.

The Personnel Office (PO) convened the second preliminary meeting on Feb. 26, 2003 to discuss whether the information and the data submitted by every unit are complete or not. At present, the contents of the proposed database will be classified into three categories—teaching, research and service.

The teaching category will include teaching hours, courses, and the evaluation of teaching while the research will include publications, awards and subsidies, participation in international conferences, special case study, the patent and technological transference. The service will cover the information about whether the teacher assumes a part-time administrative job or not, acts as member of committees or class consultant in the school.

According to IPC, we can use the proposed system by inserting registered account and password. Just key in the department to which the teacher belongs, title or Chinese name, you will find the information of the teacher you want. We can also get information by typing key words. But the right of searching information will be limited. For instance, a teacher cannot find other teacher’s data but his own ones while a departmental chairperson has the right to inquire the information of all teachers in the department. A dean of the college can find the data of all the teachers in the college.

According to the PO, because the organization of TKU is so large and the division work has so much to do, every unit must provide with the accurate data of each teacher. For instance, a PO staff member said that the record of teaching hours was stored in the database of the Office of Academic Affairs while the publication record was stored at the library. The record of research awards and subsidies was kept at the PO and the Office of Research and Development (ORD), respectively while the consultant teachers’ record was kept at the Office of Student Affairs (OSA). The IPC will assemble all these data into a database. It will be easy to find the datum about a full-time teacher of TKU if he just only moves the mouse with his finger.