| Summary: | America’s founders believed that access to government records was essential for democracy. This belief was shared by the Obama Administration, which issued orders across the government to make documents more transparent.1 Even though these efforts focused on digitization, many documents are not easy to search or obtain. For example, zoning board meeting agendas typically only exist as pdf documents, making them hard to search by locations and topics of interest. This thesis seeks to understand the accessibility of zoning documents and how feasible it would be to develop an application called “Civic Atlas” that uses web scraping to reformat zoning board meeting agendas into interactive maps and visualizations. To identify the need for this application, the thesis uses an analysis of zoning cases in sixty cities across the United States to determine whether current practices meet the goals of Open Government initiatives. It then evaluates how feasible it is to use automation to extract data from these documents. This analysis revealed three typologies of zoning documents that we use to describe zoning record systems and assess what specific features make them more or less accessible to the general public. The results show that in most American cities, zoning documents are hard to access digitally and that government officials would like products to make them more accessible. However, while improved accessibility is an interest of government officials, they see many barriers to achieving that goal, including significant limitations in staff time and resources.
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