VPRS 15136 Council Minutes

This series contains minutes of council meetings. The volumes may also include related material such as notice papers, officers' reports, and minutes or reports of committee meetings.The agenda and notice papers for council meetings were bound in the same volumes as council minutes from around March 1957 onwards, with notice papers usually on alternating pages facing the relevant minutes. However, some reports and papers can be found in the minute books before 1957.Although committees were required by law to report to council, from 1903 there was no legislative requirement for them to keep full minutes. However, the Shire of Doncaster and Templestowe kept committee minutes in the same volumes as council minutes from circa1923 to early 1953. Before and after this period, reports and recommendations from committees may be found quoted within the body of council minutes, or filed with the minutes of the next ordinary council meeting after the date of the committee meeting. (There was an overlap of administrative practices during the early 1950s, when committee minutes were sometimes filed chronologically in between council minutes, and sometimes filed behind the relevant council minutes.) Sometimes the committee reports take the form of minutes.Committee agenda and notice papers (from 1957 onwards) can be found in a separate series.Within the minute books, the records are mostly arranged chronologically according to date of meeting (with some exceptions where minutes are filed out of sequence).Some of the volumes contain their own indexes, and separate indexes are available for some years. Where indexes are not available, it is necessary to search chronologically through the volumes to find relevant information.