Understand · Explanation
What dates and blanks mean
How to tell the dates on a record apart, and how to read an empty field without reading something into it.
Why is this blank, and which date am I looking at?
Four kinds of date
More than one clock runs on a civic record, and reading the wrong one is the commonest way to be misled by an accurate page.
| The date | What it marks | What it does not mean |
|---|---|---|
| The official date | When the thing itself happened or has to happen — a hearing, a due date, an effective date | Not when it was published, and not when CityScroll saw it |
| The publication date | When the city put the record out | Not the date of the event the record describes |
| The data vintage | How current the underlying source is | Not a promise that nothing has been published since |
| Last reviewed | When an editor last checked a guide article like this one against the live site | Nothing about the records themselves |
Where a record has no official date, CityScroll can fall back to the publication date, and says so rather than presenting one as the other.
As of a day
Agency pages carry an As of day filter. Give it a date and the page keeps only the linked records whose publisher or event date falls on or before that day, so you can see the record set as it stood. Sharing the address reopens the same day.
What it does not do is reconstruct everything CityScroll knew on that date. It filters records by their own dates. What had been collected by a given day is a different question, and this control does not answer it.
Four kinds of blank
An empty field is not one thing, and the difference between these is the difference between an absence of publication and an absence of an event.
- Not shown here yet — the city publishes this, and CityScroll has not joined it. The gap is here, not in the city's publishing.
- The city does not publish this — no public, joinable release of the field is known. Where there is an obvious place it would appear if it were released, the record names it.
- Not yet joined — the record exists and the connecting record does not, so the two cannot be put together with confidence.
- Unknown — the source itself carries no value.
None of these is a zero. "No awards found for this agency" means none were found in the sources CityScroll reads, and several agencies publish their awards somewhere those sources do not reach. The classification behind these states is written down and kept as a document of its own.
A closed window is still a real record
Application windows, comment periods and hearing dates pass. When they do, the record stays, and it is still worth reading: it shows you what the process looks like, what the conditions were, and where the official notice lives.
What it is not is a current invitation. A civil-service exam whose filing window has closed shows that window marked closed, and following its apply link will not get you a place. The lesson is transferable to a window that is open; the opportunity is not.
An estimate is not a deadline
Some pages show how long something has usually taken in the past — the gap between comments closing and a rule being adopted, for instance. That is drawn from past published records, it is labelled as an estimate, and it never appears as a confirmed date. Where a real official date exists, it replaces the estimate rather than sitting beside it.
No published outcome is not a decision
Many proceedings publish their result long after the event, in a different record, sometimes in a form that cannot be joined to the one you are reading. A hearing with no published outcome is not a hearing where nothing was decided. When you need the result, the official source on the record is where to go and ask.