Navigating DocuShare
DocuShare houses all Senate documents from 1965 - Present. When you first click on DocuShare>Senate, you see a listing of years. Because of the naming conventions, papers from 2000 will appear first, followed by papers from 1965-1999. Click on a year and get a display of folders with months as the title. Click on a month, documents are organized in the following manner: agendas appear first, then the Summary of the Senate meeting, followed by the Minutes and finally the individual Senate papers.
Looking For Meeting Minutes?
What are Senate summaries?
Senate Summaries summarize the Senate meeting. They provide an outline of information contained in each of the individual Senate papers for that month.
For any given month, Senate Summaries are not available until the middle of the month. The Senate Assistant and Electoral Officer, sends an email notification to the "senate-summary" maillist once it is available.
When would I use DocuShare?
- To review Senate approved information regarding a course, program and/or university regulations
- To review Senate summaries
How does a Senate paper gets its number?
S, period, the last two digits of the year, hyphen, followed by the number order in which the paper comes into the office.
How is information organized in Senate documents relating to curriculum changes?
- An overview of the approved changes are found on the first page of the Senate document.
- There often are multiple changes within one document.
- After the introduction page, track changes is (typically) used to display new changes on the subsequent pages. Also, changes are sometimes marked in red.
An example of the first page of a Senate document with curriculum information can be found below:
On the document below you will see the general information about the changes outlined in the image on the left and the image on the right shows the detailed explanation of the changes. The image on the right was found much further down within this Senate document PDF. As a tip, use the CTRL + F functionality to search for key words within a Senate document.
Please find below search tips and information on how to look up information in DocuShare.
Searches
- Searching looks in all materials in the current location and any subfolders.
- Searches look for the terms entered in the file name, description, and within the file content.
- A search at the top level looks for any materials. Within a year folder, only that year. Within a meeting folder, only that specific meeting.
Sorting
- Sort search results based on title, which gives a general approximation of ordering by date. To sort by title, click on the “Title” header immediately above the search results.
- Alternately, sort by Edited date. To sort by Edited date, click on the “Edited” header. To reorder the search results for more recent documents, click on the “Edited” header a second time to display the most recent documents first.
Refine a search
- To refine a search, such as adding additional terms, select the “Refine Search” link immediately above the search results.
Search tips
- Keep in mind the terminology of Senate materials, as this may be different from other terminology used around the University.
- Try different words related to the query. e.g. try searching by the course number if the title doesn't yield the desired results "BIO 202" or "Genetics"
- If you cannot find the information you’re looking for, please contact Senate Assistant, at senate@sfu.ca or 778 782 3168.