Organizing Institutional Knowledge
A handful of documents is easy. A few hundred is where structure pays off. A little discipline up front keeps your Cove fast to search and easy to trust.
Use document types deliberately
Every document gets a document type — Academic Catalog, Policy Manual, Student Handbook, and so on. Types are how you filter and how you scope a query to the right body of material. Agree on a short, consistent set rather than inventing a new type per upload.
Tag for the way you’ll search
Tags add a second, flexible layer on top of types. Tag by program, department, audience, or accreditation area — whatever matches how your team actually looks things up. Consistent tags make later filtering and cross-document questions much sharper.
Screenshot — A document’s detail view showing its type and a set of tags.
Handle versions the right way
When a policy changes, just upload the new version. Because its content differs, it’s ingested as a separate document — the previous version stays in your Cove. That means you can query or compare both, which is invaluable for accreditation and audit history.
Good to know
Re-uploading the exact same file is recognized as a duplicate and skipped, so you can’t accidentally double-charge yourself or create duplicate chunks. Only genuinely changed content creates a new version.
Name things for humans
- Put the year or term in the version field so you can sort and filter by it.
- Use document names a colleague would recognize, not internal file codes.
- Keep one canonical document-type vocabulary — write it down and share it.
Once your corpus is organized, the Accreditation Auditor can move through it quickly with click-to-verify citations.