FROM STAFF REPORTS

(Updated: 9 a.m. Friday) The town of Southern Pines has announced that its entire history of council meeting minutes will be available online Saturday, using NXT, a document indexing and archiving service provided by American Legal Publishing Corp.

This system will allow any resident to do a keyword search on all the minutes since the town was incorporated, March 7, 1887.

"NXT is fast, easy to learn, and easy to use, and it will cut research time down from days or hours to minutes," said Richard Frommeyer, sales representative for American Legal Publishing. "American Legal will also provide toll-free phone support to the town regarding questions it may have about searching the minutes, as well as a help guide online."

Once implemented, NXT allows fats, full-text searches to instantly find any word, phrase, name or number that appears in the minutes. NXT also provides Boolean searching, synonym/thesaurus searching, ranked searching, natural language queries, hit-to-hit highlighting (so you can easily see the word or phrase you are trying to find), and an integrated list of search hits/results.