URBANA — Elaine Parrish isn't exactly going to miss answering the phone all day to tell folks about inmates at the Champaign County Jail.

"If it was just phone calls, it wouldn't be so bad," said the 30-year master-control employee. "We are taking all the METCAD calls, receiving teletypes, opening doors and dealing with people posting bond. We're watching all the cameras."

In a nod to technology, the Illinois Freedom of Information Act and a desire to help the public, the Champaign County sheriff's office now has inmate information on its website. The new, improved site was up and running Thursday at: http://sheriff.co.champaign.il.us/shoff/Inmpubsel.htm.

Visitors to the site can find an inmate by typing in his or her name. That takes you to a page that shows the inmate's photo, address, age, race, sex, book-in date, charge, bond, next court date and scheduled release date.

If you're just fishing to see who is in jail, type in the letter A under last name to get to the beginning of the list.

The website supplements an automated phone call-in system (217-384-1243), noted for its rapid-fire choices. Even with its shortcomings, the phone line receives thousands of calls per month. In August, there were 9,776 calls to it, said jail superintendent Mike Moore.

The website replaces one that had been operational for most of 2010 before it crashed, according to Andy Rhodes, director of information technology for Champaign County.

"We did a system upgrade and after that, it broke the old web lookup," said Rhodes, explaining that the former had to be rewritten in a computer language that the county programmers understood.

"The holdup was trying to fit it into our schedule," said Rhodes, who estimated it took about 100 hours to get the job done. Programmers had been working on it off and on since last November, when the old system crashed.

Lt. Allen Jones, the department's social media maven, said Moore had been pushing to get the information online for a long time.

"State FOIA laws are getting more and more open. It requires a significant amount of work from people behind the scenes to release information. This is an attempt to get well ahead of the curve," said Jones, who recently launched a Facebook page for the sheriff's office.

Jones said the way the information is presented, issues of identity theft are diminished.

"There is no personal identifying information like date of birth, driver's license or Social Security number," he said. "This is limited to that which we have to release anyway (under FOIA)."

The website is live, according to Rhodes, meaning there is no updating necessary.

"If somebody is booked in, as soon as they hit the enter key at the jail, that information is on the website," he said.

Moore, who is retiring later this year, said he's also hoping that the programmers can eventually put in historical information about inmates.

"We get a number of Freedom of Information requests. It takes us time to generate it. We don't want to delay in giving information to the public, but our system is not currently set up to give that type of information. We'd like for the public to be able to access that information themselves," Moore said.