Sunshine Week, a growing collaboration of organizations in journalism, government, education and other sectors promoting open government and the importance of public records, is happening now through Saturday. As part of its own observance of the weeklong event, the Davis County Clerk’s Office has upgraded its public meetings webpage with more information and improved search capabilities.

“There are people who have genuine interest in what their government is doing. And those people have a right to know what their government’s doing,” Davis County Clerk Brian McKenzie told the Standard-Examiner. “Government, I think, has a responsibility — to the extent possible — to make it as easy as possible (to get that information).”

McKenzie says that the chief objective in upgrading the website was to improve its overall searchability.

“We’ve had some records out there online … but the searchability was terrible,” McKenzie said. “While all the information was there, it was not intuitive. When we looked at implementing an upgrade, we really focused on the user experience, making it to where a citizen could get there with very little instruction.”

County commission records can be searched back to 2009; some older records are also available. As part of the upgrade, residents can now access information on Davis County Library Board meetings, with records dating back to 1945. More records will be added over time, per McKenzie.

The public meetings webpage can be accessed via https://daviscountyutah.gov/clerk/. The site is the go-to source for commission-related notices, agendas, minutes and documents, in addition to live streams and recordings.

“We’ve found that with this new system, it’s also enabling other common searches, like Google, to be able to pick up keywords and direct people to our records that are out there.” he added. “That’s another great benefit for our citizens as well.”

McKenzie hopes that the new, easier-to-navigate system can serve as a template for the dissemination of info by other county agencies and departments. And he praised his staff for bringing the upgraded site to bear.

“I’ve got an amazing records team that is focused on records preservation, classification and public access. They were heavily involved in that,” he said. “We worked with our partners, with our IT department, to implement this new system and make sure that it had the security measures and procedures in place there. Just a number of people within my office and within our information systems department working together to get this up and rolling.”