I now added an option to display the users also as an alphabetical list (mainly to have a reason to put a context menu on that page ;-) )
See http://www.univie.ac.at/lqp2/people-list
Of course, there are some questions to the drupal masters:
* how to make sorting by name sort by last name? apparantly this was somehow solved in the author name facets
* It might be a good idea to provide an email adress - how to protect us from spam? on lqp1, the "@" is replaced by a gif, for example. can this be handled automatically by drupal? we should also add a short explanation (or even better, an option) saying that the email will be made public. for the time being, I switched off listing email adresses in this table
The facet API's way of allowing a customized sorting algorithm is much nicer because it allows hooking in a comparison function between names. The same sorting for our views that list people is in progress (new module "viewsort") and is intended to shuffle the views' render arrays by using a _pre_render hook.
Once this is done, the same hook should allow rewriting mail adresses into a spam-avaoiding format. :-)