Genie Tyburski publishes TVC Alert, "a free weekday news bulletin [which] reports on industry events and Web-based resources for library and legal professionals." She noted in her February 18 mailing, about municipal codes being online and gave a link to a Seattle Public Library site that in turn links to seven publishers of municipal codes. Apparently there is some degree of overlapping, and there are also situations in which some codes are listed under one publisher and not under others. I checked Louisiana, and the Seattle page had only one listing and that was for Shreveport, Louisiana. However, one of the seven links on the Seattle page was to the Municipal Code Corporation. I clicked on that link, and, when I checked, I found this description on its site:
"Contained on this website are Codes for more than 1,100 local governments in searchable online databases, and information about many other services and products including community planning templates, custom publishing and document imaging."
I frankly was surprised to learn that so many codes were available for searching. For instance, I found that the Municipal Code site included 36 different codes just for Louisiana, including not only one for New Orleans, but also others for cities that had populations of less than five thousand.
If you want to subscribe to Genie's newsletter, just follow the instructions on her site.
3/8/2004:
Here's a message with additional iformation that I received from Municode's customer support:
"1. We currently host 1,418 municipal codes online.
"2. They are updated based on their supplement schedule, usually either bi-weekly, quarterly, or bi-annualy.
"3. The banner page tells the ordinance codified through and latest supplement date.
"4. We provide a wide range of legal publishing services, more fully explained at: http://www.municode.com/services/codification.asp. . ."