About Record Library

The City Record Online Library houses important public records held by the City of Sacramento, in a manner that is easily accessible to online users.

Record Library Terms:

Public Records

Public records include any writing containing information relating to the conduct of the public’s business prepared, owned, used or retained by the City of Sacramento regardless of physical form or characteristics. “Writing” means handwriting, typewriting, printing, photostating, photocopying, photographing, transmitting by electronic mail or facsimile, and every other means of recording upon any tangible thing, any form of communication or representation, including letters, words, pictures, sounds or symbols or any combination thereof, and any record thereby created, regardless of the manner in which the record has been stored.

Record Category

A category represents a broad subject area of records. Records may be sorted by category to aid the user to more quickly find the record in questions. Currently there are six record categories available in the repository: Meeting Materials, Resolutions, Ordinances, Meeting Minutes, Budget Documents and Building Permits.

Search Type

The Online Record Repository has two search tools: simple and advanced. Both search tools permit the use of “Boolean” search criteria. A Boolean search request consists of a group of words or phrases linked by search connectors such as AND or OR to precisely indicate the relationship between them. And any words search request consists of unstructured natural language or a plain English query. In a natural language search request words such as AND and OR are disregarded. Instead use quotation marks to indicate a phrase and an asterisk (*) or question mark (?) to indicate wildcard.

Examples:

• When searching for a record that contains the phrase: on street parking, use quotation marks in the search field to find that exact phrase. “on street parking”
  
• The wildcard operator * allows 0 or more characters added to the string in the search text, and the operator ? allows a single character. If the user enters "*ran" for search text, the query would return "restaurants" or "insurance"

Full Text

All of the records in the online record repository, with the exception of the building permit cards are fully text searchable. This means that the system is able to review every single word on every single page to retrieve the requested record.

PDF (Portable Document Format)

All the records in the online record repository are PDF files – or portable document format. Download Adobe Reader

Use the Document Search to:

• Find documents that contain a word or phrase in the document body
• Search within a specific category
• Display search results as a list of documents in a versatile grid format
• Download or open retrieved documents

Website Accessibility

The City of Sacramento is committed to ensuring that this web site is accessible to everyone. If you have any questions regarding the accessibility of this site, please contact us. We are continually striving to improve the experience for all visitors.

Currently, our site contains many records in the Adobe Acrobat PDF file format. Most of these records are accessible (to one degree or another) by those who use assistive technology such as screen readers. Some legacy or software created PDF files, such as scanned records, may not be accessible. If you are unable to view a record and would like to request a paper copy please visit our website at: http://www.cityofsacramento.org/clerk/services/Records.html for more information on how to make a public records request. Over time, we will be working to reduce the number of PDF records we have on our site to improve the accessibility of the information contained within them.