The screenshot is the City of Ramsey Homepage:
http://www.ci.ramsey.mn.us/
There are two data access points noted by the blue underlining for current records, and the red underlining for archived material [the legacy LaserFiche WebLink database, maintained on a shared governmental server not internal to direct city data services]. The Public Meeting Notices feature [left sidebar, not underlined] has existed now for years, allowing residents and others to be put on an emailing service for notices regarding user-selected meeting items and date reminders.
The new feature, (blue underlining), puts all upcoming meeting materials online as produced by city staff, for equal timing of access by all citizens along with the city officials on council (or the boards and EDA, for example). Paper delivery of meeting agenda items by Ramsey police officers as done in the past is now superseded, making things paperless or starting that way, and freeing police time for policing.
The ongoing bottleneck. I had an opportunity to speak by phone with Mayor Ramsey about the other part of Ramsey data, the archive accessed as "DOCUMENTS" on the website sidebar, (per the red underlining).
That routes users to a different document server, not owned or operated by the city, where several governments share storage and access bandwidth. Ramsey has an allocation of "public" bandwidth apart from preferential staff access, as I understand things, to the LaserFiche WebLink database of past archive documents. The mayor has agreed that access by search in that data is non-intuitive, at least one city staff person has said even staff has access bottlenecks at times, and I on a too frequent basis aim to access the archive and get an "all lines busy" kind of error message, meaning the public access bandwidth allocated to Ramsey happens, when I try to log on, to be all in use.
Search is primitive there, more like search in the 1980's than by Google or Bing services now available for general web materials.
Previously, it was feasible to download pdf items from the stored images in that system, and to review searched for and retrieved materials offline, so that bandwidth was freed and not hogged by long usage and access times. Currently, after site changes, it appears some access is improved for individual image records; but if there's still a way to download pdf copies of archived materials it is a mystery to me and any reader who can explain whether it's a present system feature or removed is asked for help.
In any event, the download feature is NEEDED beyond doubt, because otherwise time online with bandwidth so limited means other subsequent users are denied access until the now lengthier sessions are concluded by users fortunate enough to log on with the first, second or third try.
Mayor Ramsey is not a database expert and says so, hence I have a request in to staff on whether/how under the new LaserFiche WebLink software update, downloads are done, if at all. Hopefully I can add an update with a positive message about this.
The Mayor indicates a longer term goal would be to convert the LaserFiche WebLink data to local storage, probably as downloadable pdf documents.
My suggestion was that Google and Bing [Microsoft's latest search brand] as part of their business model are generally happy to spider-crawl "dark web" or "deep web" data such as municipal records, and to index them for online access; free of charge to the data repository.
That means, if my understanding is correct, Google and Bing would both do indexing free of charge, with spider-crawl updates at a reasonable frequency, free of charge to the city. The business model is to optimize access to everything available, unless told not to index particular owned material, to encourage user volume allowing higher charges that the indexing services charge businesses for advertising space and for demographic access/usage data collecting which provides the income that allows indexing and access without data source fees being charged.
That might not be so, but I think that once the LaserFiche WebLink umbical is cut and the data is put onto a city owned server or other, better service, it is a no-brainer to get Google and Bing indexing for serach purposes.
In effect, twenty-first century search instead of 1980's search paradigms.
__________UPDATE__________
Amy Dietl, one of the city's information technology people, has sent an explanatory email, with screenshot detail, on the new software and data services methodology for current data [agendas and minutes].
I will post the screenshots and explanatory text in a FURTHER UPDATE, but later.
Still, the bottleneck is archive materials access, the LaserFiche WebLink part of the data storage and information retrieval services the city provides citizens.
Half a loaf, it's still better than no bread at all; but let's hope the IT bakery's not finished at that level of divided access. Clearly, it is always proper to streamline current and future methods first, and to later upgrade archive access.
This is as praiseworthy a step as renting city hall space to the license office, so people need not risk ingress-egress onto a busy stretch of accident-prone Highway 10, as with the prior licensing location, north side of Highway 10, toward the Thurston light - between there and the Sunfish Blvd. light.