How to Use the Leaders' Library
One of the first things you'll notice about the Leaders' Library is that you've got choices—don't be intimidated! You can use as many or as few of the search fields as you want. They're there to help you refine your searches, not to demand answers when you might not even be sure of the question.If you know what you're looking for: try the keyword search and ignore the drop-downs. The results you get will be sorted by relevance—how many times your keyword is used on a page—and grouped by resource type: Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) services are listed first, then flyers, handbooks, etc.
- Quotes can be useful when looking for exact phrases. For instance, searching for welcoming congregation (two words, no quotation marks) will bring up everything with either word in it. Searching for "welcoming congregation" (two words surrounded by quotation marks) will bring up the Welcoming Congregation Program and other resources that mention the program.
- Refine your results with one or more drop-down choice before hitting the "Search" button. For instance, if you know you need something from the Office of Church Staff Finances, select "UUA Church Staff Finances" from the "Author" drop-down.
If you're not sure what you need: try one or more of the drop-down menus. Our staff have manually selected the topics, subtopics, etc. that we think are most relevant to a particular resource. Experiment a bit to see the power of your choices:
- Select "Governance" from the "Topic" drop-down and click "Search" to see all our leaders' resources related to governance.
- Select "Governance" for "Topic" and "Assessment Tools" as the "Subtopic" before clicking "Search" to see assessment tools for governance.
- Select "Assessment Tools" as the "Subtopic" for assessment tools on any topic.
- Select "UUA Commission on Appraisal" as the "Author" to see all the reports from the COA.
- Select "Racial and Ethnic Concerns" as the "Subtopic" and "Articles" as the "Resource Type" before clicking "Search" to see articles about racial and ethnic concerns.
Different from the Google Site Search
The Google site search will look for your keywords in every page on our site, and will rank the search results based largely on how many other pages are linking to them.
The Leaders' Library searches only our hand-picked resources, and separates UUA Services from other resource types. Results are ranked (if you've used the keyword search) by the number of times your keywords are used in a resource entry, or alphabetically if you've only used drop-down selections for your search.
Both search options are useful in different ways to address different needs, so we're pleased to feature both.
Didn't Find Something?
- Too many results: try refining your search by selecting an additional option: add a topic selection to your keyword search, for instance, or look by topic and author.
- Too few or no results: try expanding your search by selecting fewer options: a simple keyword search, or one topic, or one subtopic, or one author selection. It's also possible that a resource still needs to be entered into the Leaders' Library. Let us know if you think something is missing.
- Unexpected results: since every topic, subtopic, etc. is manually selected for each item in the Leaders' Library, we can make adjustments to search results that don't make sense. Please let us know if you see something odd.
You might also find it useful to browse our list of topics or review the table of contents from our Directory.
For more information contact web @ uua.org.
Last updated on Friday, April 18, 2008.
