What the Item Library is

The Item Library is a council-maintained collection of reusable agenda items. Library items are independent of any specific agenda or meeting — they persist until you deliberately delete them, and can be inserted into any future agenda as many times as you need.

Each Library item can be scoped either to a specific committee or marked as council-wide. Council-wide items are available whenever you build an agenda for any committee. Committee-scoped items show up by default only when building agendas for that committee, though you can always widen the filter to see everything.

Where you'll find it

• CouncilAdmin > Library — the full Library index, showing every item across all committees plus council-wide items. Use this to add, edit, delete, and organise items independently of any particular agenda.
• The Library dropdown, while building an agenda — click it next to any agenda item to save that item, or to insert something you've previously saved.

The three ways to use the Library

1. Save an agenda item to the Library. From the agenda view, save any item (and its sub-items, files, papers, links, and tags) to the Library for future reuse. The original stays on the agenda — saving always creates a copy, unless you choose the Move option (see below).

2. Insert a Library item into an agenda. Insert a saved item into the agenda you're building, in one of three ways: after an existing item, as a child of an existing item, or as a replacement for an existing item. Multiple items can be inserted at once, and any sub-items you saved come with them, hierarchy intact.

3. Copy an item from a previous agenda. As an alternative to the Library, you can copy an item directly from an earlier, committed agenda into the one you're building now — without saving it to the Library first. This is best for one-off retrieval; use the Library instead for anything you expect to need again and again.

The "Move" option — use with care

Move isn't a separate action — it's an optional toggle attached to saving and inserting:

• When saving an item to the Library, enabling Move removes the item from the agenda once it's safely saved (only available while the agenda is uncommitted).
• When inserting an item from the Library into an agenda, enabling Move deletes that item from the Library once it's been inserted.

Move cannot be directly undone. But the moved-item can always be copied back into the Library later on!

Keeping items reusable with placeholders

A Library item can include placeholder tokens such as {{meeting_date}} or {{committee_name}} in its title or agenda text. These are automatically filled in with the correct details when the Library Item is inserted into an actual Agenda. The full list of available placeholders is covered in How to Create and Use a Library Item.

What the Library never carries across

However an item reaches an agenda — saved, inserted, or copied — some things are deliberately left behind: minutes text, minute ordering, and approval/adoption flags are never saved to or inserted from the Library. Internal notes (visible to staff only) also stay behind. This keeps Library items safely reusable without dragging meeting-specific history along with them.

How this differs from Default Meeting Content and Model Agenda Templates

CouncilPapers has three features that all help you achieve consistent papers while avoiding retyping recurring content. They solve different problems, and it's easy to confuse them:

If you find yourself manually inserting the same Library item into every single meeting of a particular committee, that's usually a sign it should be set up as Default Meeting Content instead — see Setting Default Meeting Content.