Seattle City Council decides not to index public records

Posted Wed, May 13, 10:22 p.m. inappropriate

I wonder how long it will take for the first test case to be filed.

Posted Wed, May 13, 10:59 p.m. inappropriate

Do not vote for any incumbents. It is the only power that you have to make any change.

Seriously...just look at them. How hard can it be?

Posted Thu, May 14, 7:38 a.m. inappropriate

This conversation is being approached the wrong way by both sides.

Think about trying to find a web page on the Internet with no guide. That's what the Seattle City Council is proposing. If you happen to know the URL for the site you're looking for, you might be able to browse through it and find the right page. Or maybe through serendipity it will be mentioned on another document you're looking at.

But on the other hand, indexes are overrated. True, Yahoo!'s index created order on the world wide web and turned it into a useful knowledge base where you were likely to find the answer to a reasonable question. However, all of that indexing required a whole ton of manpower to fit each site or page into a Dewey-decimal-like hierarchy of classification. Labor intensive, rather subjective, and very limited in scope.

I say, fine! No more index! Instead, publish everything digitally to the Internet.

All documents created by the City of Seattle must be presented in digital form to be roboted by Google, Live Search, Yahoo!, and who ever else has a fancy. Then we can use the search engine of our choice to do full text search over the entirety of the content. We won't be forced to discern which Seattle database it's in, or how to tease answers out, or who to talk to in government, or how to file a public records request.

One caveat - all images, maps, and charts must be accompanied by a paragraph of explanatory text. An index's real value comes when the indexer can provide perspective or terminology that places the document in context. Possibly there are other limited scopes of documents that need annotation or finding aids as well.

Posted Thu, May 14, 4:24 p.m. inappropriate

It is unfortunate that Kent misrepresented the actions of the Council, as well as giving misleading information about the state public records act.

Council Bill 116496 requires all Departments of the City to implement State Auditor and Attorney General recommendations for managing the public records process by adopting rules for complying with the Public Records Act modeled on those that have been in place in the Legislative Department for the last two years.

One very minor part of the legislation declares that Seattle will not create a citywide index of records. The exemption from creating a citywide index is a provision included as an option in the Public Records Act, has been adopted by other relatively large governments like Seattle (including Tacoma, Bellevue, Federal Way, Kent, Spokane Valley, Yakima, Kennewick, and Snohomish, Pierce, and Kitsap Counties), and simply clarifies what has been the City's informal practice for the last 35 years.

A centralized index is not an effective tool for large governmental entities with decentralized Departments, is very expensive (King County has spent three years and millions of dollars and still has not been able to create a workable index), and is unreliable because it must rely on a variety of Departments to update and maintain. Instead the Council requires all Departments to have individual document retention schedules posted and available, as well as to make all existing indices available to the public.

The City currently has a document map for active records in the form of its retention schedules, which outline categories of records held by each department that are subject to approval by the State Archives. In addition, all departments maintain topical indexes and databases of their records, many of which are available online.

I have directed Council staff to respond to public disclosure requests with the most open interpretation possible, underscoring our intent to be as transparent and accessible as possible. This legislation was reviewed extensively by the Special Committee, which consists of Councilmembers Licata, Harrell, Clark, and myself, over the last two months, with full public participation. A number of amendments included in the legislation were recommended by members of the public.

Public records belong to the public, and this legislation will make it easier to ensure that. The ordinance not only complies fully with the letter of the Public Records Act, but with the spirit. It ensures that all Departments must be responsive to the people's right to know.

Posted Thu, May 14, 11:03 p.m. inappropriate

"... simply clarifies what has been the City's informal practice for the last 35 years." R.C
.
I'm confused. We have not had computers for 35 years and I distinctly remember frequenting not that long ago the Seattle Municipal Library, a City Hall branch of the Public Library, where a whizz of a librarian not only indexed (cataloged) the work product of city government (both paid and volunteer), applicable state and federal government too, but could find in 5 minutes the answers to questions you were not yet able to phrase.

Geniuses before Richard's watch decided to save money and put all the research library's documents on open stacks in the main branch. The few remaining were finally put under lock and key and are now inaccessible—inconsistently cataloged with no one available to answer questions as to their existence or significance, let alone find them

As the phrase "the end of history" slips into history, one thing stands out. Kent and the rest of us who have trouble keeping inaccessible "facts" straight had one thing right all along— its not the end of history, just the dark ages when we have to relive history to uncover it.

The real problem with inflating the cost of information is that we become dependent upon selective information. How sad that it now seem so preposterous for the Council to have simply reinvented the Municipal Research Library when the Mayor shut off the Council's access to line staff.

Posted Fri, May 15, 11:43 a.m. inappropriate

Richard:

Thank you for responding in this forum to clarify and explain the council's intent.

Rather than a central index, it would be useful to have a single portal into the various databases. The only databases I'm aware of and use are through the City Archives. Currently I have to determine whether I'm looking for an ordinance, resolution, meeting minutes, something in the special indexes, or a general topic. If I'm looking for all background about a topic, hopefully I remember to check them all - and a web search on seattle.gov as well. It would be very nice to search across all at once, and to know that I'm searching all publicly available data.

It would be even more useful if this were available from anywhere on seattle.gov - if you shared it with Google, then your current search box would find that information as well.

To be fair, I have the exact same problem with the Library of Congress, for example. They have lots of great data available on their site, but you have to know where to look for it. Which is quickly forgotten. And because it's not available through search engines, you have to stumble on or be told about each database. It's a prevalent problem.

Posted Fri, May 15, 3:04 p.m. inappropriate

Richard:

"It is unfortunate that Kent misrepresented the actions of the Council, as well as giving misleading information about the state public records act."

Could you please address both of these issues, neither of which is elaborated on in your comment. Please tell us precisely what was misrepresented, and exactly what was misleading rather than just making undocumented accusations.

Please give us the opportunity to take your comment seriously.

Posted Tue, May 19, 1:04 p.m. inappropriate

Indexing may be very useful or pretty much useless. Depends on how the index-less records are stored. If they're scanned images with unsearchable text using cryptic file names like ab345jgh.pdf and stored with creation dates that are the same as their archive dates, then they're useless.

If the text in the documents can be easily searched, file names are descriptive (e.g., Seattle City Council Meeting Agenda 12-04-08) the creation dates for all files are retained, and all files are made available online to Google, then there's no need for indexing. Using Google to search a flat directory with thousands of files would do nicely. In essence, the files are implicitly indexed by Google.

Upshot is that these files should all be indexed. Letting Google index is the smart, effective, inexpensive way to index. Paying government workers to index them is less smart, less effective, and more expensive. Creating a set of random hard-to-search, hard-to-find, hard-to-use documents, is unfortunately, what I expect your average local government to do, on the advice of the in-house attorney, to avoid law suits, the public be damned, the Attorney General be damned, transparency be damned, open government be damned.

We'll see. (Or maybe we won't be able to because the decision will be so opaque...)