Municipal Code
From Sunshine Review
A Municipal Code Book is the collection of a municipality's ordinances and subsequently codified in a perpetual manner (typically in a binder format) and maintained through contract with an outside codifying company to ensure all updates to the publication are published and distributed in a timely manner. This distribution time frame typically is set forth within a Municipal Ordinance.
Once an ordinance has been approved by the Board, the Village Clerk then forwards the information to the codifier. The codifier is then responsible for a variety of line-item tasks, such as ensuring proper citations are inserted in their appropriate locations, suggestions pertaining to organization of ordinances, editorial scrutiny, and noting conflicts and inconsistencies once an ordinance has been passed by the Board.
[edit] Ideal items in Municipal Code Published Online
Although there are no current standards for the publication of municipal codes and ordinances online, here are a few features you should look for:
- Keyword search ability
- Citation search ability
- Date and time search ability
- Category search ability
- A clear explanation on how to search the ordinances
- Home page entry point into the search feature
- Printer-friendly availability for both the results page and the actual ordinances
The ranking algorithm used by the internal search engine should provide the following:
- The results page should display the entries clearly marked with at least some form of date/time stamp
- The title of the page (which should include descriptive keywords and any line-item citations to help properly rank results)
- An exclusion of words such as the, and, of, in
- Assign lower rankings for common words such as ordinance, the municipality's official name and other supporting terms to augment the probability of a direct-connect between the end-user and the ordinance holding such information.
- Flexibility in sorting results via pivot points such as date and search results ranking (can be shown as a percentage)
