BCC Document Library is not very usable

So far in 2025 (as at 07/05) Bristol City Council have published 508 documents. In 2024 they published 1,094 documents. There is a lot of very useful and interesting documents in this library, and is an important resource for residents of Bristol.

The Council publish a list of these documents on their website, but I could not work out the order they are published in, and you have to navigate through 304 pages to browse them all. It was almost impossible to find out what documents had been recently published and which ones were most often downloaded.

I decided to publish this document data in a more usable format to make it easier for people to navigate this large set of documents.

Features

I have organised many of the documents into "Themes":

You can also view documents published in a specific period:

And you can see which documents are most popular (have been downloaded the most times):

This is functionality you find on many modern web sites, but Bristol seem to be a bit behind the times in this area.

Bristol City Council Digital Strategy

Their Digital Strategy which was refreshed in 2024 and contains these "vision" statements:

Local Councils have got a very big challenge when it comes to keeping their IT Systems up to date, secure and usable. The threat of Cyber Attacks is growing as we can see from the recent attacks in the UK Retail Sector (M&S and the Co-op). BCC reference this threat in their strategy:

Institutions are increasingly targeted by cyber-criminals, and major attacks can bring public services to near-standstill and take months or years to recover from, costing millions of pounds. Increasingly it is a case of when an attack is successful, not if one will be, so we need to minimise the risk and be ready to respond.

Insights into Document Usage

The Top 10 Popular Documents are:

The most popular documents in the library are School Term Dates.

The 3rd most popular document is the manual for the "Ideal Logic Combi Boiler", which I am assuming is the boiler installed in council properties.

Top 10 Popular Documents published in 2025:

From this list you can see that a lot of people wanted to find out about the RPZ price increases. There are also a lot of landlords looking for property licence information.

The Quality of Life Priority Indicators Briefing is also in the top 10 and contains some interesting insights.

School Allocations for 2025:

People are most interested in Redland Green School and Bristol Free School allocations.

Diversity and Equality:

These are the most popular documents related to Diversity and Equality: