Directory Access supplied by On the Side Publications
MHEN UKFSMHA DWP all DWP MH+LD DWP MH
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Directories Find |
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Directory Access supplied by On the Side Publications |
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MHEN UKFSMHA DWP all DWP MH+LD DWP MH
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FINDING A SPECIFIC ORGANISATION
1. You will probably have already decided which directory to browse, for example you may only be interested in employment. We do not yet provide any specific assistance to searching across all our directories. You may find that the search engine we provide on the On the Side home page is of some help here, but it will yield pages other than directory pages.
2. Once you select one of the five directory views, there are four ways in which you can search for an organisation, using the All, County and Region buttons provided
3. If you know the organisation's exact name you should go to the full alphabetic list via the All button above. There is a problem here as many organisations precede their name with "The" or other prefixes, and you may need to read the whole list. This is very long for some directories. However the alphabetic list is a single file, so you will be able to use your browser's Search or Find facility on the file to look for parts of the name or its town or county. On a slow modem this might take some time. In addition there is always some ambiguity about whether a placename is a town or not!
If you find the organisation in the alphabetic list you can go to the organisation's details by clicking the link which appears with its name. This is not a good method for browsing for a specific organisation if you do not know its name as you will be doing a lot of page changing!
3. If you know the county in which the organisation is located, the time element is much reduced, as we also present a separate file for each county, many of which are quite short. Start with the county list which is just a list of county names together with the number of organisations from the directory you are browsing and which are in that county. Only counties which have relevant organisations appear in this region list, to save false starts. Each county file contains all the details we publish for all of the organisations in that county. and this can be quite long. The original directory has additional information we cannot release or which we have so far chosen not to release for space or accessibility reasons.
4. Counties are considered to be in regions and we also present a region list which gives the counties for each region. So if you know roughly where the corganisation is you can try the counties adjacent to it. Regions are not an exact science and different organisations divide up the UK differently. We have chosen a purely geographical division which is the same for all of our directories; if we had chosen a division based on Health Service or Government jurisdictions we would not have the required data for all organisations. Where there is doubt we have generally used the postcode look-up facility provided by multimap.com to place the organisation. However, do email us if you disagree with our choice of counties for each .region.
FINDING AN ORGANISATION NEAR YOU
5. This is considerably easier than if you are looking throughout the UK for a named organisation. In this case you go straight to your county, using the region and county list. Then you would browse though that file by eye, or use your own browser's Find facility.
6. The largest search you will have to do is currently the 361 London organisations from the full DWP employment project directory. Most of the time you will find far fewer than this. To narrow down the choice look for a particular service supplied.
FINDING A SPECIFIC KIND OF SERVICE
The directories we support have different perspectives for their services and we cannot present a unified terminology for these as the organisations are very diverse. In the employment directory however a good deal of thought was put into this by the University of York researchers who identifed 45 specific services supplied by the organisations they surveyed. We have put these numbers in the on line directory, so you can use your browser to look for organisations which supply them. You can only do this within a county.
DOING FURTHER ANALYSIS AND RESEARCH
These directories are mainly for people to use to find a helpful organisation or to locate an organisation in a similar field to exchange experiences. They are not presented in way which would naturally support wide ranging queries and research. If deeper analysis is required than is possible with this browser interface, then in the case of the Departmentof Work and Pensions directory you may wish to obtain a copy of the CD Rom from which this data has been extracted, and which could be analysed using Microsoft Access queries or Excel pivots.
In any case you would want to begin with reading DWP's In house report 93 produced by Hilary Arksey , Patricia Thornton, and Julie Williamsof the University of York for the and which appears on the DWP web site.
COMMENTS
If you do find this site useful, do let us know how you used it and of course of any problems you encountered, as we may wish to improve it in the light of your experiences. by email, please.