Reference

Glossary

The words you meet while reading records on CityScroll, in the sense the city and this site use them.

What does this term mean?

Last reviewed 2026-09-06

How to use this page

These are the terms you meet in the records and in this guide. They come from the journeys the guide teaches rather than from city government at large. Where a term has an exact meaning somewhere else on the site, this page gives the plain sense and points at the page that owns the detail.

Records and publications

Term	What it means	Where you meet it
The City Record	The city's own daily publication of official notices, and the source behind much of this site	The Official source link on a notice
Notice	One published item — a solicitation, an award, a hearing announcement, a rule proposal	Everywhere records are listed
Solicitation	A published invitation to respond to something the city wants to buy	Contracts
Award	A published statement of who the city intends to give the work to	Contracts
Registration	The step after an award that puts a contract in force, published as its own record	The contract lifecycle on a notice
Rule	A change to how an agency does something, which must be published before it is adopted	Rules
Mandate	A duty an agency has under a law — to report, to make a rule, to hold something — which its publications are evidence about	Connected mandate on a notice
Matter	One thing being decided, which several records can belong to	Meetings and contracts
Land-use project	An application to change what may be built or how land is used, moving through a published review	Land
Exam	A civil-service examination, with its own filing window, conditions and later eligible list	Exams
Eligible list	The ranked list of people who passed an exam, from which agencies hire	Exams

Bodies and geographies

Term	What it means	Why it is easy to confuse
Agency	A city department or office that publishes and acts	Agencies are renamed; a renamed agency keeps one page here
Community Board	An appointed local board, numbered inside a borough	Board 7 exists in more than one borough, so a number alone is not a board
Community district	The area a Community Board covers	It is a place; the board is a body
City Council District	The area one Council Member represents, numbered citywide	Its lines do not follow community district lines
Borough president	The elected office for one of the five boroughs, which reviews land-use applications	Its recommendation is not the decision
City Planning Commission	The body that reviews land-use applications before the City Council	One stage of a review, not the end of it
Vendor	An organization named on a procurement record	The published name is used exactly; spellings are not merged

Connections and evidence

Term	What it means	Where you meet it
Connection	A claim that two published records refer to the same thing	Between any two linked records
How this connection was made	The panel giving the basis for a connection, its relation and its official source	On a connected record
Matched by a published record	Joined on an identifier the publisher issued — the strongest basis	In that panel
Record-linkage match	Joined on content such as a name rather than an identifier	In that panel
Person-accepted	A pairing someone reviewed and accepted	In that panel
Official source	The link to the city's own published copy of the record	On every record
Claim link	The address of a page with one connection already inspected, which can be shared	Your browser's address bar

Dates and gaps

Term	What it means	What it is not
Official date	The date the record is about — a hearing, a deadline, an effective date	Not the publication date
Publication date	When the city put the record out	Not the date of the event
As of day	A filter keeping only records dated on or before a day you choose	Not a snapshot of what this site knew then
Data vintage	How current the underlying source is	Not a promise nothing has been published since
Last reviewed	When an editor last checked a guide article against the live site	Nothing about the records
Estimate	A range drawn from comparable past records, always labelled	Never an official deadline
Not published	No public, joinable release of this field is known	Not a statement that nothing happened
Not shown here yet	The city publishes this and CityScroll has not joined it	Not a gap in the city's publishing

Identifiers

Identifier	What it identifies	Where it comes from
PIN	One procurement, which several contract records can share	Published on City Record procurement notices
Request ID	One City Record notice	The City Record
BBL	One tax lot — borough, block and lot together	City property and tax records
Exam number	One civil-service examination	The Department of Citywide Administrative Services
Project ID	One land-use application, such as 2022M0258	The Zoning Application Portal
Mandate ID	One duty, such as 64116-001	An address on this site. The duty itself carries the law it comes from, cited on its page

Things this site does

Term	What it means	Where it is explained
Watch	A saved topic that emails you when new records match	Controls and what they give you
Preview	Seeing what a watch would send, without starting one	Controls and what they give you
Investigation	A set of records you pin in your own browser, with notes	Controls and what they give you
Flag	A computed note saying a record is worth a closer look	Flags and historical patterns
Source contract	The registry entry describing one source and how current it is	Where the records come from

Sources used in this article

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