This system will allow any resident to do a key word search on all the minutes since the town was incorporated on March 7, 1887.
"NXT is fast, easy to learn, and easy to use, and it will cut research time down from days or hours to minutes," said Richard Frommeyer, sales representative for American Legal Publishing. "American Legal will also provide toll-free phone support to the town regarding questions it may have about searching the minutes, as well as a help guide online."
"NXT was used to create a single searchable collection of meeting minutes for the town of Southern Pines," said Troy Smith, director of electronic publishing at American Legal Publishing.
Once implemented, NXT allows fast, full-text searches to instantly find any word, phrase, name or number that appears in the minutes. NXT also provides Boolean searching, synonym/thesaurus searching, ranked searching, natural language queries, hit-to-hit highlighting (so you can easily see the word or phrase you are trying to find), and an integrated list of search hits/results.
"NXT also allows American Legal to organize and sort the minutes in an easy-to-naviagte table of contents, so that they can be browsed by date -- in most cases, we do this in reverse chronological order," Smith said.
Placing the meeting minutes in NXT and having them indexed was part of the town's initiative to provide residents and business with greater access to their government.
"With the anticipated continued interest in Southern Pines as an area for growth and development, quick-and-easy access to historical records has never been more important," said Town Manager Reagan Parsons.
"I congratulate Administrative Services Director Jane Dreher and her staff for their successful implementation of this project," said Lynn Thompson, director of library and information technology services. "The ability to search for and view town council minutes will serve as a key feature in the town's revised Web site. It exemplifies the interactive, customer focus that we are developing on the site, and supports our goal of making government more accessible."
American Legal Publishing Corp. has been serving local governments nationwide since 1934, first as a division of Anderson Publishing, and since 1979 as a separate corporation. It has published codes of ordinances for more than 1,900 clients. They publish new codes and supplement existing codes, as well as publish codes, meeting minutes, charters, planning and zoning codes, and technical manuals online.
Staff includes 13 full-time attorneys who perform legal reviews of ordinances and prior codes.
The company has more than 140 municipal clients in North Carolina. American Legal has been the codification consultant to the North Carolina League of Municipalities and has prepared the Code of Ordinances for the Town of Southern Pines for more than 20 years.
