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Andornot has recently completed a project to assist the City of Burnaby migrate various historical council documents from an outsourced search service to internally hosted websites using the Andornot Discovery Interface (AnDI).  The previous site was organized so that files were Previous systemviewable in a hierarchical structure organized by document types, meeting types and years. 

To permit more administrative control and more  granular searching, Andornot was contracted to create a new Inmagic DB/TextWorks database for selected Commission and Public Hearing documents. DB/TextWorks is used extensively by the City of Burnaby for the behind the scenes data entry for much of the Heritage Burnaby website, as well as for multiple other internal databases.

Boards, Committees and Commissions

Scripts were created to load details of these documents into DB/TextWorks and to extract additional metadata about each document derived from the file structure.  The new website at https://bcc.burnaby.ca/en uses the Andornot Discovery Interface to index this data from DB/TextWorks as well as the full text of the documents. Burnaby_Kingsway_searchIt permits searching and viewing agendas and minutes for past meetings of Boards, Committees and Commissions prior to 2015.  Now when searching a common term like Kingsway which brings up a 100 hits, it is possible to narrow down search results by both the Board, Committee or Commission name and the year.  In addition a snippet of text with the search term highlighted is shown to provide context.  Whereas in the previous system agendas and minutes were separated, PDF’s for both are now presented together.

Bylaws

Bylaws were also migrated from the previous service.  Heritage Burnaby already contains every Bylaw ever adopted by the City of Burnaby from its incorporation in 1892 until present Burnaby_Bylaws_search(amended, defeated, repealed), all of which are maintained in a DB/TextWorks Bylaws database.  However there was the requirement to provide access to just the current and enforceable City of Burnaby Bylaws, some of which are available in consolidated versions.   These consolidated versions were added to the Bylaws database and a separate website at https://bylaws.burnaby.ca/en was developed with options to search; view all bylaws; or pick from an A to Z listing.

Both new websites allow users to re-sort their results, add documents to a list, or share them on social media.

If you are looking for a solution to provide better access to council documents and bylaws, or any other set of documents, contact Andornot to discuss possibilities.

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