What is the Additional Documents search?

The World Bank’s Access to Information Policy allows records to be made publicly available upon their capture in the Bank’s records management system when given a “public” security classification. The Additional Documents search includes records that have been classified as “public” and are still in the custody of the organizational unit that created them. Records may originate from any unit in the World Bank including operational, global practice, administrative, and research and policy. According to the World Bank’s policy on records management (AMS 10.11), a record belongs to the originating unit for twenty years at which point the custody of the record is transferred to the World Bank Group Archives unless it has previously been destroyed in accordance with an approved records retention and disposition schedules.

What types of records are included in the Additional Documents search? 

The Additional Documents search covers a variety of record types, including the following: correspondence; memoranda; draft and final versions of reports; training, conference, and event materials (presentations, meeting agendas and minutes); country information; non-project and non-program related legal documents; and records related to Bank projects (mission documents, aide memoires, and others). Records may originate from any unit in the World Bank including operational, global practice, administrative, and research and policy. Records included in this search do not appear in World Bank repositories that contain final and curated collections, such as Documents & Reports, Open Knowledge Repository (OKR), and Open Data. The Additional Documents search includes records published since June 2015. However, these records may have been created before June 2015 but were only recently published. 

Are documents in the Additional Documents collection searchable on external search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo!, etc.?

The records found in the Additional Documents search are not proactively added to external search indexes. However, if a record is linked on a web page that is crawled, it will be included in Google’s search index.

What metadata is indexed for search?

Currently, there is no full-text search capability. Caveat: authors profile the information associated with a record, thus the information is not curated and may not accurately represent the record. The following attributes are searchable: Document Name; Document Description; Country; Region; Project ID; Project Name; Author; Document Type; Language; Web Publish Date; and Document Date.

Can I use the World Bank’s external search to find these public records?

No, the World Bank’s external search can be found at http://www.worldbank.org/en/search and does not include results found in the Additional Documents search on http://pubdocs.worldbank.org.