Shared Governance Document Library Guides

What is the Shared Governance Document Library?

In late 2025, UWRF engaged with a consultant to modernize the Shared Governance groups storage of documents, as well as improve document search for the campus community. SharePoint was selected as the storage location, with the consultant developing the below Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for maintaining the document library moving forward.

How-To Guides:

Create a New Meeting Date:

Browse to the UWRF Shared Governance Document Library SharePoint site and browse through to the desired Shared Governance organization or committee.
In the "Current Year Agenda & Minutes" section, click the "Add new item" button in the upper left corner of the table (note, click the below screen shots to enlarge):This will launch the "New Item" window. Set the following fields:
1. Title: Insert the date in the following format MM-DD-YYYY
2. Meeting Date: Select the meeting date by using the calendar to select the correct date
3. Academic Year: Input the current academic year in this format: YYYY-YYYY (example 2025-2026)
Click "Save" and then proceed to the next step to upload an agenda, meeting minutes, and any supporting documents.

Upload Agenda & Meeting Minutes

Browse to the UWRF Shared Governance Document Library SharePoint site and browse through to the desired Shared Governance organization or committee.
Click on the "Documents" tab at the top, it should bring you to a page that looks like the following:
Navigate to the desired group or committee folder. If the folder for your meeting date has not yet been created, click the "New" button and select "Folder" as indicated below:
Title the folder with the meeting date in the following format: MM-DD-YYYY
Click the "Upload" and "Files" button, and select the agenda and meeting minutes for the meeting.
Once the files are uploaded, open a new tab to the home page for your committee or Shared Governance organization.

Link Meeting Agenda, Minutes, & add Additional Supporting Documents

On the homepage of your Shared Governance organization or committee, click to the left of the meeting date, a small check mark will appear to indicate the meeting date is selected. Click the "Edit" button that appears next to the "Add new item" button (click the below screen shot to enlarge):
Switch to the tab with the meeting documents folder open. Click the "Share" icon next to the meeting agenda and click the "Copy Link" button in the dialog that appears:
Switch tabs back to the meeting date page, and paste the agenda URL into the "Enter a URL" field under the "Agendas" section, enter "Agenda" in the "Alternative text" field:
Repeat steps 2 & 3 for the meeting minutes.
To add additional supporting documents to the meeting date (such as draft motions or reports) scroll down to the bottom of the meeting details window and click the "Add attachments" button. Select and upload relevant documents to the meeting date. (Note: the file name will be displayed to the user, it is helpful to ensure these additional files are named descriptively for easy identification.):
When finished, click the "Save" button to commit your changes.

Annual Review and Maintenance

Upon a new academic year, a member of the respective shared governance group, likely the secretary, should change the status of each of the previous years entries to "archive" under the status field (Reference: Link Meeting Agenda, Minutes, & add Additional Supporting Documents, step 1.). The links will then be listed in the archive section.

Search Best Practices:

Use the search bar at the top of Shared Governance site to search for your content. Once you've searched, you can use filters to further refine and reduce your results (for example, if you only wanted PDF documents, or wanted to search for documents uploaded/modified within a specific time frame (click the below image to expand):1) This “File Type” filter allows you to quickly filter out incorrect file types. For example, if you’re looking for a presentation, you can filter to “PowerPoint”, which will greatly reduce your search results.

2) This “Last Modified” filter allows you to filter to a range of dates (either specific dates, or a period relative to today, such as “Past 3 months”) to filter your list on. If the document you’re looking for is recent OR if you’re very confident that a document has not been touched since its upload and you know that date, this is a great way to filter out other possibilities. However, note that this filters on “Last Modified”, NOT “Date Uploaded”. If a file is uploaded on one date, then modified later by anybody, the second date is what will be filtered by. Thus it is not a perfect date-based filter and use caution, as you may accidentally filter out your desired document.

3) This allows you to sort by one of four options: Relevance (the default option), Date Modified (newest to oldest), Date Created (newest to oldest), and Date Created (oldest to newest). This is a great tool for getting the sought documents to the top. If you know a unique detail about your document, search for that detail and keep this to “Relevance”. If you know it was recently updated, search what you know and use “Date modified (newest)”. If you know it’s a very recently-created document, use “Date created (newest)”. And if you need an old document – maybe you want to find the first time an initiative was mentioned – use “Date created (oldest)”.

4) This top filter is used mostly when searching for things other than documents. If you’re searching for something different, click the relevant option here. If you’re searching for a document, you can hit “Files” here, but it likely won’t have a large impact on your results.

For more advanced searches, additional capabilities are available:

If you are searching for an exact phrase (either in a document or in a document title), enclose your search term in quotes for an exact match (e.g "committee members")
Boolean operators: you can use AND/OR to search documents that match multiple criteria (e.g committee OR board, committee AND board)
Title search: If you know your search term is in the title of a document, you can use a title search: title:Committee minutes (this can be combined with quotes to exact match the title of a document)
You can combine various combinations of the above to optimize your search further (e.g "committee" title: agenda OR title: minutes)

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Shared Governance Document Library Guides

What is the Shared Governance Document Library?

How-To Guides:

Annual Review and Maintenance

Search Best Practices:

Deleting...

Updating...

Shared Governance Document Library Guides

What is the Shared Governance Document Library?

How-To Guides:

How-To: Create a New Meeting Date

How-To: Upload and Link Meeting Documents

Annual Review and Maintenance

Search Best Practices:

General Shared Governance Site Searches

Optimizing Search Criteria

Deleting...