About Southtowns Record

What this is

Twenty-six towns, villages and one city make up the Southtowns. Each posts its board records on its own website, in its own format, and most of them get little regular news coverage. Southtowns Record gathers those public documents into a single archive that anyone can search by town or by topic.

It is nonpartisan and neutral. Records are shown as their publishers posted them, with a link back to the original. We don't endorse candidates or take positions on local questions.

How records are collected

• Only documents a government has already published online are collected.
• Our collector identifies itself as SouthtownsRecord, makes at most one request per second to any website, and does not get around access controls.
• Every original file is kept unchanged. If a document is later replaced, both versions are kept.
• Scanned documents are converted to text so they can be searched and read with a screen reader. That conversion can make mistakes, so each document links to its original.
• The archive checks for new records every morning. Communities are being added one at a time; see Towns for what's collected so far.

Topics

Topic tags are assigned automatically from the words in each document. They're a way to find related records, not a judgment about them, and they can be wrong.

Contact

Questions, corrections, or a record we should include? Municipal staff: if our collector causes any trouble for your website, or you'd like us to fetch records differently, please tell us.

Email: [email protected]