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County Library Puts Public Documents on the Web with askSam

Surrounded by forests, farmland, and swamps, the town of Perry, Florida is hardly a high-tech wonderland. Yet technology has arrived and even here local government is facing the challenge of publishing public information on the Internet.

Without a dedicated IT staff or a large budget, the task of putting this information on-line has fallen on Boyd Bruce, the Director of Library and Information Services for Taylor County.

"While researching how to make this public information available, I was discouraged by the cost and difficulty of using a Microsoft SQL server to publish these documents. Pretty frustrated with the whole idea, I was voicing my aggravation during a run with a buddy, and he assured me this was very possible and easy to do for half the money I was expecting. He introduced me to askSam."

Boyd and his staff imported and entered various documents into askSam databases. These databases were then made available via the Taylor County Web site with the askSam Web Publisher. Aside from some basic HTML coding, the solution required no programming. The end result is the Taylor County Electronic Document Archives containing Board Of County Commissioners' public documents in electronic format: http://taco.perryfl.com/search.htm. Documents such as Board agendas, meeting minutes, project notes, plans, and contracts are made available to the public free of charge.

"We have been using askSam for one month and I couldn't be happier. The ease of use for the end user is a great advantage. Before this information was available on-line, if you needed information on government programs or meetings you would have to go to the courthouse and begin your search by hand through filing cabinets. Now with askSam you can go on-line and easily search this information and get exactly what you're looking for and never leave the house. You can keep track of what your local government is doing and get referrals on-line too."

Looking to the future, Boyd will be working to provide the citizens of Taylor County with more information.

"There are so many excellent services that we will be able to provide in the near future now that we have such a flexible and user-friendly way to deliver all this useful information to the public. For example, we are planning to develop a number of on-line databases for; reader's advisors, local reference, local referrals, a homework database, an accelerated readers database, as well as a homework bibliography database. The flexibility of askSam and ease of use make it a very cost effective way for any library or government organization to make public information useful and accessible."

Boyd Bruce

Director of Library and Information Services for Taylor County

wanaxa@taco.perryfl.com

http://taco.perryfl.com/search.htm

If you need to make meeting records available on-line or on an intranet, we have created a Minutes Template to make this easier for you. To download the Minutes Template see:

http://www.asksam.com/four/surf17/template.asp  

Tell us how you use askSam:
http://www.asksam.com/four/surf17/storyform.asp