Thursday, January 29, 2009

For First Time, Annual Oregon Housing Council Minutes Combined Into Single Searchable PDF File.

In looking for 2008 Oregon Housing Council minutes, I found that the Housing Council website had a combination of minutes in three separate formats: MS Word, PDF text readable files, and PDF scanned files (which users cannot search for text).

In order to improve the usefulness of the minutes, and to increase transparency, I converted both the MS Word documents and PDF scanned files into PDF text readable files. I then combined the minutes for all 10 Oregon Housing Council meetings in 2008 into a single PDF text readable file, and added bookmarks for each meeting. I have posted that file HERE.

It is now possible (for the first time) to download a single document containing all of the Oregon Housing Council minutes for 2008 and do a text search for a specific keyword or topic and retrieve ALL instances where that keyword or topic appeared.

I am hopeful that in the future the Oregon Housing Council will publish all of it's minutes in a single most useful format: text readable PDF.

No comments:

Post a Comment