About Civic Library
If you’ve ever tried to keep track of how an issue or policy you care about is winding its way through the the Berkeley city government, you’ll know that it’s somewhere between difficult and impossible.
Civic Library tries to help with that by organizing and surfacing the city's public records in a more modern and thoughtful way than what we have available through the tools that the city provides.
If you've got feedback or ideas on how to improve this service, I'd love to hear them.
What about Berkeley’s Public Records Search?
The city does provide a document search interface. You should give it a whirl at City of Berkeley Records Online. Personally, I've only occasionally found it very useful. Many documents show up in search results but aren't actually available to be viewed.
Additionally, the search feature leaves a lot to be desired. For example, a search for compete streets yields some relevant records, but also a lot of irrelevant documents - zoning board appeals, wildfire safety planning, and more. Right now Civic Library isn't doing any sort of ranking - the search is very simple. But I'd like to build that out.
Right now Civic Library only tracks council agendas back to January 2019. The city's public records search page has information going back decades.
About the data
Records are collected in one of two ways - either through web scrapers or parsing PDFs. A web scraper is a program that visits a website, downloads the HTML, and uses its structure to extract information. A PDF parser is a program that turns PDFs into text (ideally with some structure to them). Most data is collected in an automated fashion. If you come across any missing or incorrect data, please reach out and let me know.
Project Roadmap
These are some updates I hope to make in the not too distant future:
- Daily data refreshes
- Item results / vote counts
- More advanced search functionality
- Searching through the full content of an item
- Addition of Committee and Commission agendas and agenda packets
- And more…
About Me
I’m David Shere, a software developer and proud Berkeleyan. I live in North Berkeley with my wife and kids. I love to walk and bike around town. I pay somewhat close attention to what's going on at the city council, and I'm currently serving on the city's Housing Advisory Commission.