Storing Council Documents

One of the key features of a local council web site is the presentation of documentations such as agendas and minutes ideally in a form which is accessible to all and is searchable (especially useful in the case of minutes).

Accessibility

In the ideal world all documents would be uploaded as HTML, however that would require the clerk to create them in HTML, which isn't reasonable. The "export as HTML" tools available in popular word processors such as Microsoft Word produce dreadful HTML and can open up problems relating to confidentiality_[1].

The issue of accessibility precludes simply uploading Microsoft Word documents as these are only easily readable by people who have Word or other proprietary software which isn't available on all browser platforms_[2].

The solution we recommend is to upload documents in Adobe PDF format. There are viewers for PDF format files available on all popular platforms. More importantly there are now very low cost tools available to create PDF files. Our recommended tool is Pdf995. It costs US$9.95 (so about £6.50). The way it works is that, once installed, it creates a new "printer" which, when you print to it, creates a PDF file. So if like most clerks, your clerk is using Word to create the minutes then they:

go into Word, open the document (pc200312.doc say) and ask Word to print it
in the print dialogue they select the Pdf995 "printer"
they will then get a Windows file selection dialogue which they use to select a name to save the document as (pc200312.pdf perhaps)

We have produced a page for the clerk explaining how to do this, and also how to upload the resulting PDF file to the Opus web site which you can find here.

[1]	some versions of Word export in the HTML generated tags which identify who edited the document and how the document changed over time.
[2]	At The Hug for example we use the Opera browser under Linux so if we come across a Word document we have to save it to disk and then attempt to view it under OpenOffice or fire up a Windows PC and use Wordview.

Searchability

Having uploaded the document to the Opus web site as an article the next question is how do visitors to the web site find the document. We have tackled this in two ways.

First of all we have added a new Opus tag {index} which lets you embed an index of uploaded documents in a page. You can see it in action on this page where the entries for all minutes after August 2003 are being automatically generated by an {index} tag.

This index is automatically updated, so when a new document is uploaded the index automatically includes the new document. It also respects embargo and expiry dates, so your clerk can upload minutes as soon as they are prepared but if your standing orders call for a delay between circulation to councillors and their publication on the council noticeboard, as Milton's do, then the clerk can embargo the document and it will automatically appear on the site on the right day.

Secondly, if you have installed the right tools on your web site which can extract the raw text from a document Opus' search engine will allow visitors to search the documents.

Implementation

All of the above requires some setting up by the publisher and we have a page which explains what is needed.