By Jonathan Smith, Managing Editor

A proposal approved at the Oct. 1 Students’ Association meeting will recommend student pictures be made available on the directory of myACU.

Student opinion on the proposal will be collected before a final decision is made about presenting the proposal for final approval to the appropriate university officials, said Sen. Kim Smith, senior class and psychology major from St. Louis.

If SA decides to go through with the proposal, James Langford, director of Web Integration and Programming, said he will need approval from both Wayne Barnard, dean of Campus Life, and the priorities committee, which tells him what projects to work on.

Langford said the technical aspects of making the pictures available shouldn’t be too difficult for employees in computer and network services and Web integration and programming, who would be doing the work, but he said he didn’t know an exact timeframe for how long it would take.

Smith, who presented the proposal, said the Student Government Association Research and Development Committee , headed by executive secretary Suzie MacKenzie, senior computer science major from Fort Worth, got the idea for having pictures available to students from Oklahoma Christian University.

Smith said she believes adding student pictures to the online directory will be helpful for students.

“When they mention a person’s name in Chapel prayer requests and someone thinks they know who that is, this will give a way to put a face with the name,” Smith said.

Although pictures aren’t currently available to be viewed by students, Langford said the system is already in place for the faculty and staff.

“We did the programming for teachers several years ago to help them learn student names as early as possible into the semester,” Langford said in an e-mail. “We’ve just never had a similar demand for students to be able to see each other’s photos.”