It looks like the City Record is online! This is the most important newspaper you’ve never read!
=== What was done ===
Since the signing of the legislation, City staffers, City Council, and community technologists, led by BetaNYC, have worked together to unlock the information in New York City’s most important publication – the City Record.
The City Record Online Workgroup (CROW) with their government partners identified opportunities to increase context and sustain the knowledge of data NYC generates. Our first significant milestone was reached when they delivered a tool and workflow to extract location data from existing data. The CROW team plans to continue engaging the city to improve and standardize the city Record’s public data format and collaborate to extract data from thousands of historical City Record PDFs.
=== Stats ===
- 25 meetings with DCAS
- 40 community meetings
- In our meetings with DCAS; we demonstrated citygram. Talked about the power of geo-located data. Demonstrated simplified search and subscription tools. Highlighted, several times, how community boards & community based organizations could / should use this data.
- Convinced DCAS to add dates and address to meeting notices
=== Team Quote ===
"Cracking open unstructured data is always an adventure. Cracking open NYC’s most valuable newspaper has been historic. Never before has the public had this level of access to the City Record team and its underlying data.
BetaNYC and community partners are honored to have worked with the city to develop free and open source tools for all New Yorkers. Today, on the City’s GitHub page, you can download tools that will churn through the City Record and enhance its usability. Over the next year, we are super excited to continue this partnership and improve this dataset. We are honored to pioneer a path that will make the City Record useful to all."
=== Tools ===
Scraped PDFs are accessible via DORIS - http://a860-gpp.nyc.gov/results/?user_input=city+record&btn=Search
Overview - https://github.com/CityOfNewYork/CROL-Overview
In this repo you can learn about the City Record Online Workgroup and its objectives.
CROL - Address Parser - https://github.com/CityOfNewYork/addressparser
This is the first of many parsers we are building to turn the City Record’s raw data into machine readable data.
CROL - Web App - https://github.com/CityOfNewYork/CROL-WebApp
Through this tool, you can enrich City Record data though the parsers we are working on.
CROL - VM - https://github.com/CityOfNewYork/crow-vm
With this tool, you can download the web app and run it locally.
