Organizing Archived Documents for Searches

Question

I work in a small city government that has 10+ years of individual pdf documents that record the decisions of our City Council. Often, I am called upon to go back into these documents to find when a specific decision was made, or what the details were around that decision. Doing a search using Adobe Acrobat on each, individual pdf is tedious, and I am trying to determine what might be the best way to effectively search documents over one or more years. I would also like to make this capability accessible to my city's citizens on our city website, but I don't want the public to have the ability to "find and replace" any of the content in these pdf records.

Without signing up for Acrobat AI Assistant, I am thinking that one "quick and dirty" way to get this done is to scan a full year of pdfs into one document (about 350 pages) and post that full year of records online for community members (and me) to search using Acrobat's text recognition conversion. This way, there is only one pdf document for each year, and my official record of past City Council decisions is not accessible for someone to "find and replace" any content.

I would appreciate the thoughts of the Adobe Community on my approach. Any thoughts on a better non-Acrobat AI Assistant solutions would also be welcomed.

Thanks very much for your help!

Souvik Sadhu · Answer

Hi @jim_1263,

Hope you are doing well. Thanks for writing in!

In case you are still looking for a solution, here is a suggestion:

While Acrobat doesn’t have the advanced indexing features of a dedicated DMS, you can add metadata to the document to make it easier to sort and search for specific records later.

Add Metadata to Your PDF:
- Open the document in Acrobat Pro.
- Click File > Properties.
- In the Description tab, you can add basic metadata like Title, Author, Keywords, and Subject. Adding relevant keywords (like "Council Meeting", "Decision Date", etc.) will make it easier to find specific decisions.
- In the Advanced tab, you can also add custom metadata if necessary.
Tip: If you're combining PDFs from multiple years or meetings, make sure to include the year, month, and any specific decision-related keywords that will help people find relevant information.

Hope this helps.

-Souvik

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