Resources: Forms

One of the National Council's guidelines for local council Web sites maintains that "The council site cannot replicate any BSA publication currently for sale through the Supply division" - however, a number of applications and other forms that councils wish to provision via their Web sites are Supply items.

With this in mind, the Supply Division and the Office of the Chief Scout Executive have granted special dispensation for several of these items to be provisioned via council Web sites. These items, along with other common forms, are listed at http://www.scouting.org/media/forms.aspx

Your council Web site may augment the forms provided with additional forms so long as they are BIN items - the entire list of Supply Division forms was considered, and only those items listed were considered appropriate for distribution via the Internet.

To ensure that council sites are providing their members with official and up-to-date versions of these forms, a repository of PDF forms will be maintained on the National Council site. The information that follows provides technical instructions for including these forms in your council's Web site:

Linking Individual Forms

Rather than making copies of the forms to your Web server, we recommend linking directly to the forms on National's server. This will ensure that the forms you provide are up-to-date, and will save your council the effort of maintaining them as well as ISP fees for storage and transfer.

To link to any form on the BSA server, include the complete URL to the form's PDF file, thus:

<A HREF="http://scouting.org/filestore/pdf/34426.pdf">Local Tour Permit Application</A>

To determine the URL of any form on the site, visit the menu of forms and click the right mouse button (or hold "command" while clicking if you use a Macintosh) and select "Copy link location" ("Copy shortcut" on some browsers) from the pop-up menu. This will copy the URL to your system clipboard so that you may then paste it into an HTML source document.

Including the Menu Interface

If you would prefer to include the entire list of forms in your site as an interface, the menu itself may be included within a frame of your council's site. Instructions for doing this are provided elsewhere.