Older minutes had no text
A 2014 agenda was already on the council site. Many were scans. Those older years now have searchable text on this index. Not every file. Not every listing. Cite the original.
The older years were public. They were not text.A 2014 cabinet agenda was already on the council site. It sat in a year list, or in a scanned pack, or as a picture of a page. That is publication. It is not the same as being able to search the words inside it, or to put that file next to a later minute and a spend line. For years the older pile was public and still closed to a search box.
That pile now has text on this index. Not every file. Not every listing. Enough of the older years that a phrase in a 2014 agenda can be found as a phrase, then opened at the original publisher.
What changed
Committee papers go back further than the last couple of civic years. Many of those files were images. Some were Word or Excel packs that never became searchable text. Institrace now holds text for a large share of that historic set: agendas, minutes, reports and registers that were already online. Published is not the same as findable is the problem. This is the older half of it.
Take an invented council, Vale Civic. Its 2014 licensing minutes named a lease. The PDF was a scan. A reader who knew the meeting date could download it. A reader who only knew the street or the company could not. The same file, with text, can be found by those words. The join, if there is one, still needs a published identifier. The search only makes the page readable.
What this is not
It is not a rematch of papers that already had text. Those stay as they were. It is not a claim that every historic scan is now words. Some files stay images. Some listings never opened. Forty one bodies remain closed to us. We do not invent a page for a host that will not serve one.
It is not a finding about Vale Civic or any live council. Older text is still only the publisher's words. Cite that file. How a body enters the list is on Methodology.
What you can see without a login
Titles and counts on Sources, including bodies whose older years are now in the catalogue. A sample of recent titles on each body page. The count is the number of papers in the index, not the number you can read while logged out. Full text needs a signed-in seat. A 14-day trial starts after a card is on file.
Read next
A pin is not a join is how a seat keeps a subject together without writing it into the index. The public catalogue and the index is what a seat opens. The FAQ is the short answer.