The UMRA Organizational Continuity Committee oversees the preservation of UMRA processes and institutional knowledge.  For the most part, the documents that hold this collection can be found on the Governance Documents page of the website, under Resources. They are organized into six categories, representing different parts of UMRA, as shown in the website submenu below.

The main Governance Documents page holds operating documents such as minutes, annual treasury reports, policies, and organization-wide documents such as Bylaws and our MOU.  

The pages below governance documents hold toolkit documents and annual reports.  Toolkits capture the learned experience of those who have led the organization.  These pages contain annual schedules of activities, tips and templates for tasks, and whatever else the officer or chair considers key to maintaining smooth operations or simplifying the next leader’s tasks.  Annual Reports summarize  UMRA leaders’ reflections on challenges and progress of the previous year, from the perspective of their role.  They help incoming and future leaders focus on key issues they may encounter in the coming year or beyond.  

These documents are valuable tools to help prevent reinventing the wheel, as can happen when records of past actions are lost. They are stepping stones for building on actions or improvements made in the past.    

Search

While the categories aid in finding information, the best tool for finding something in such a large array of documents is to use the Search field, found in the top right corner of every UMRA web page.  When you need to know about a particular topic that could be mentioned in many different documents, search will greatly simplify your efforts.  

Simply enter a keyword into the Search field, and click the magnifying glass icon.  The search will return results from the UMRA website only.  Above those search results, you will see search results for People and a link to a search of all the UMN sites.  You will need to scroll past those to see your results.  Here is a search results screen for the keyword “target.”

There are additional ways to search beyond a simple keyword search that can be very helpful in narrowing the results from your search.  Here are a few of the most useful:

• Enclose search terms in quotes:  (Example:  "Steve Jobs")  Forces an exact match, excluding synonyms and partial matches.  Steve Smith or Jobs reports will not be returned in results, this way.
• Specify the document type:  (Example:  filetype:pdf steve jobs).  Searches only in a specified document type (used to exclude web pages).  Any valid extension can be used (e.g. PDF, DOCX, HTML, PPT, ...)
• Exclude a word using "-":  (Example:  steve jobs -apple).  Returns only pages/docs having both steve and jobs, but NOT apple, resulting in a much shorter list!

Additional search commands are available.

The search function can be used to find content throughout the UMRA site, whether it is a past article you wanted to look at again, or a current page that you cannot recall how to find.