For investigative journalists: hold power to account at document level
Why you want this
Power is held to account through documents: council proposals, executive letters, attachments, motions, parliamentary papers, published decisions and rulings. Those records are public, but they sit in as many places. The BesluitBron puts them on one address, in a single conversation with Claude: 331 municipalities, provinces and water authorities, the register of the Tweede Kamer, the full text of its papers and of Woo publications by 616 government bodies, 6,6 million official publications and 3,7 million registrations of Dutch case law. One connector, free of charge, no account.
The difference with a search engine: instead of ten blue links you get answers with source references down to the page. Claude searches, reads and compares the underlying records and returns page numbers and literal fragments, so every claim you publish traces straight back to the source document, original URL at the source organisation included.
The point of that single address is not convenience. It is that one question can combine the sources: the council debate, the permit as it was officially published, the parliamentary paper that set the policy, and the ruling on the objection. Every tool carries its source as a prefix, so with each finding you know which register or which index it came from. That is exactly what a methods paragraph needs.
The local part comes fresh from the council information systems such as iBabs, Notubiz, GO and Parlaeus, disclosed through Open Raadsinformatie and OpenBesluitvorming.
From practice
1. The alderman says A, the dossier says B
Ask: "What has the executive promised about traffic safety around schools since 2023, and what was actually decided?" Claude builds the history with the dossier timeline, pulls the relevant records and puts promises next to decisions, including page-precise quotes where the two contradict each other.
2. From local incident to national pattern
Ask: "Which governments struggle with financing heat networks and what did they decide?" The nationwide overview counts documents per municipality, province and water authority and per year; then you zoom in on the most striking sources. One afternoon of work for what used to take weeks of phone calls.
3. The whole chain behind one decision
Ask: "Which permit was granted here, what did the council say about it, what did parliament decide about the scheme behind it, and how did the objection end?" Four sources, one conversation: the publication with exact totals, the council records, the register of the Tweede Kamer with the vote per faction, and the ruling. Vanished documents are covered too: what stood on a government website in 2020 or 2021 is preserved, even where the page itself is gone.
4. Bulk research with your own tools
For data journalism you export thousands of document references (id, source, type, title, date, original URL) as CSV or NDJSON in one command, with a download link that loads straight into your spreadsheet or pipeline. The export is reproducible: same question, same scope, a verifiable methods paragraph for your publication.
5. Who was in the room?
People, parties and committees can be retrieved per municipality, memberships included, and for the Tweede Kamer the vote per faction with the seat totals attached. Useful to reconstruct who sat where when a decision fell.
What it does not do
The BesluitBron does not choose which source answers your question, and it invents no coverage that is not there. Every source states in the answer how hard it is: a register with exact totals is not the same as an index whose totals are estimates, and a search that finds nothing is no proof that there is nothing. Before publication, that is the difference between a source and an assumption.
Connect Claude and start digging
For the newsroom
Digging through a file before publication leaves a trace on the public installation: for every call, the tool, the arguments, the source and the search terms are kept for ninety days. An editorial office that does not want that can run the same software on its own infrastructure. The log then sits in its own network, with a retention it sets itself.
An own installation also has its own rate budget at the source platforms. That shows as soon as a data desk exports thousands of document references in one command.
What an own installation takes
Search right away, no AI
There is also a direct search function, for simple use without an AI assistant: one search screen searches all six sources at once, with every result linking straight to its source.