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Health & Fitness

Oak Forest Public Access Leads Through Legacy Library

While many municipalities continue to resist video and audio recordings of public meetings, the City of Oak Forest has a history of leadership when it comes to producing relevant content to its community in the video/audio medium.

However, one critical aspect of broadcasting public meetings is the distribution method(s) chosen to provide access to the content conveniently and smoothly to an audience.

While many municipalities continue to lag behind in acquiring web space, Oak Forest takes their initial distribution method (local cable) and doesn't stop there.  

With Americans With Disabilities Act arguments certainly available for argumentative convenience, being able to access to these types records is not about whether or not a person has been classified as disabled as a reason for the inaccessibility to the content.  

For example, are citizens to be considered disabled if their online service provider cannot transfer content provided by government in an expedient manner?  Is someone to be classified as disabled if their work schedule does not dove-tail with a public meeting schedule?  Is a satellite viewer disabled if their provider disables recording capabilities for just the government access station(s) and they are out having dinner with their family in their backyard or local restaurant?

So although I am entirely unfamiliar with their vendor, PEG Central, an on-demand service for streaming video from LEIGHTRONIX seems to provide Oak Forest a real boost in this direction of providing the fullest scope of accessibility to public documentation as resources can provide.

One healthy design feature is that visitors can immediately begin choosing public meeting videos by a fairly well-structured drop-down menu providing keywords such as "Council Meeting" and even "COW Meeting."  The page is pretty simple and not over-cluttered with advertisements, either.  There is an ability to also search by date, along with a short set of keywords regarding the content.

On the improvement side, one logistics issue relative to indexing audio/video is that there is only so much time in a day to spend on contemplating keywords before it becomes a waste of time.  It isn't that the content somehow becomes less relevant, rather other extrapolations become attractive options, such as attaching a transcript to the content, or if that is not possible, at least having a direct-connect to the supporting documentation (i.e. meeting minutes, agendas, etc.)

I suspect with a little tweaking of technology, these supporting documents can certainly send keyword searches of video/audio content into an entirely different level of customer service as it relates to accessibility and individual perceptions of just what degree of accessibility should be achieved and sustained as part and parcel of providing the public some measure of evidence as to what exactly is going into the day to day operations of their local government.

So kudos to the City of Oak Forest and their long legacy of producing Public Access productions actually accessible by the many rather than the few or none.  Their public documentation library is a legacy the City can be proud of!

P.S.  As of a month ago or so, the municipal code book for the City of Oak Forest was the only municipal code book on the shelves of the library at the Markham Courthouse.  Although it hasn't been updated in a while, being the first and only is certainly a milestone worth making note of. 

P.P.S. It remains a shame those shelves remain so bereft of local law books being used within the system of judgment being performed in said courthouse.

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