May 22, 2023
Coherent Digital releases World Cities on the Policy Commons platform — curating and preserving hundreds of thousands of publications from over 1,000 cities worldwide.
Contact: Toby Green
Coherent Digital today released a new collection on the Policy Commons platform. World Cities curates and preserves hundreds of thousands of publications from over 1,000 cities worldwide.
The reports, research papers, statistical analysis, and other publications are hard to find and unstable, published on websites that are prone to broken links or disappearing altogether. Coherent assigns persistent links, so that the documents remain available and usable for research and teaching.
“Cities around the world generate extensive research, yet their work gets lost. This is our most ambitious grey-literature project to date.” — Stephen Rhind-Tutt, Coherent’s president, who calls the documents “the greyest of the grey” because of their lack of discoverability, inconsistent metadata, and impermanence
“This output shows how cities globally are approaching population growth, climate change, education, healthcare, public safety, immigration, and jobs. But without backup copies and permanent identifiers, this important policy is at risk of disappearing.” — Toby Green, founder of Policy Commons
The database is updated weekly and also reaches back to capture historical policy. The resource finds and saves select content from major urban centers, with careful attention to the Global South. World Cities will continually grow, with an anticipated 500,000-document milestone by the end of 2023.
World Cities is the third project on the Policy Commons platform and is cross-searchable with Global Think Tanks and North American City Reports. More information can be found at https://coherentdigital.net/pocw. Trials are available.
Coherent Digital was founded in 2019 by industry veterans Stephen Rhind-Tutt, Toby Green, Eileen Lawrence, Pete Ciuffetti, and others. We find important content and make it useful. Through Coherent, information is saved, uniquely tagged, stabilized, and made discoverable.
