Coherent Digital Acquires Index to Current Urban Documents Database
Information Industry News
Coherent Digital has acquired Index to Current Urban Documents from ILM Corporation.
Index to Current Urban Documents contains more than 5 million pages of reports and research statistics published since 1972 by local government agencies, civic organizations, research organizations, public libraries, and metropolitan and regional planning agencies in hundreds of major North American cities.
Coherent Digital will relaunch the database as Policy Commons: Cities, a new sister product to the Policy Commons database of publications from think tanks, NGOs, and IGOs.
Municipal reports document in hard, practical terms how policy is implemented—but the reports are often neglected. The experiences of more than a million individuals working at 20,000 departments from 500 cities show historical and current approaches to critical issues including climate change, racial equity, public health, pollution, policing, transport, animal control, water quality, and energy. Policy Commons: Cities will capture, index, and preserve this valuable research and the associated data.
The reports include Findings from the Minneapolis Dept. of Human Rights (2022), which documents the George Floyd case; Lessons Learned: City’s response to protests exposed vulnerabilities in Portland’s police accounting system (2022); Report on the Status of Female Firefighters (2018) from the city of Boston. Empirical data from well over 100,000 reports reveal what policies have and have not worked—and how the actions and attitudes of local governments have changed over time.
Stephen Rhind-Tutt said, “Students, faculty, and researchers will be able to find, access, and analyze these often overlooked or hard to find files in new ways. Librarians will be able to preserve and disseminate reports they hold, quickly and at low cost. The collection is a natural complement to the reports we currently publish from IGOs, NGOs, and think tanks.”
Policy Commons: Cities will include all the files from Index to Current Urban Documents from 1999 forward plus an additional 50,000 reports, and it will grow by at least 20,000 new documents per year. The product will launch early in the second half of 2022.
More information can be found at https://coherentdigital.net/pocc.
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About Coherent Digital
Coherent Digital was founded in 2019 by industry veterans Stephen Rhind-Tutt, Toby Green, Eileen Lawrence, Pete Ciuffetti, and others. We find important content and make it useful—so researchers can do their work, educators can teach, scholars can publish, and organizations can disseminate their knowledge to a global audience. Through Coherent, information is saved, uniquely tagged, stabilized, and made discoverable.
About ILM Corp
ILM Corporation was founded in 1976 with a goal of helping public and private sector companies convert paper materials into digital data. Based in Fredericksburg, Virginia, it provides expert document conversion, data entry, and digital mailroom services for the federal government and organizations of all sizes.