The 28 volumes of this collection were prepared on the basis of the documents held in the Shanghai Municipal Archives. They represent the full run of the minutes held by the Shanghai Municipal Council from its beginning in 1854 to its demise in 1943. They do not include the minutes, if they were preserved, of its predecssor, namely the Committee on Roads and Jetties. For most of the period, the minutes were hand-written. Yet from 1906 onward (vol. 16), the use of type-writer was introduced. The quality of the type-written text is fairly low, but neverthless it was processed through OCR to produce a full-text searchable document for the 1906-1943 period (vols. 16-28).

The digitizing of this set of The Compte rendu de la gestion was made possible through a joint project between the Institut d'Asie Orientale and the Institute of History (历史研究所) of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences (上海社会科学院). The Institute of History generously made available its collection of Compte rendu de la gestion to share with the worldwide community of scholars.