NRS-21704 | Chelmsford Hospital Royal Commission Transcript Enquiry System (STATUS) database [Royal Commission into the former Chelmsford Private Hospital and Mental Health Services in New South Wales]

Full description

This series comprises of the orginal binary source code for the database that was called STATUS (STATUte Search). The STATUS software was used for the Royal Commission into the former Chelmsford Private Hospital and Mental Health Services in New South Wales. The origins of STATUS dates back to the 1970s where Bryan Niblett, a computer scientist and barrister, developed a retrieval program for the United Kingdom Atomic Authority to enable searching for atomic energy legislation. The program itself proved over time not to be so inspiring as a database but did show itself to be a leader in programming search language.

In 1977 an academic from the Australian National University who had recently returned from the United Kingdom with a copy of the software piqued the Attorney General's Department's interest in using the system. In 1981 the Standing Committee of Attorneys-General (SCAG) announced that all the Attorneys throughout the respective States of Australia had agreed that they would only permit statutes and cases from their jurisdictions to be included in systems which conformed with the database design and user interface of the STATUS software. The benefit of using STATUS was that it was capable of running on a number of different platforms. Subsequently this enabled Commission staff to carry out searches of the transcript, submissions and other support documents electronically therefore requiring no need to maintain an extensive and unmanageable index.

A personal computer (PC) running MS-DOS was considered the most effective solution when STATUS was transferred to the Archives Authority as office staff were familiar with this particular environment. The database was the main entry point into the physical records. The CRC database was downloaded to an appropriately configured standalone PC. The software ran on 16 bits and was kept running to provide access to the records from the Commission until 2018 when a digital migration occurred into the Digital State Archive.

The following related series hold all the data extracted from the database as plain text files for ongoing access and preservation: NRS 20944, NRS 20945, NRS 20946, NRS 20948, NRS 20949. The originally binary code has been retained to maintain original order of the Commission Records and as an example of early database technology which will be able to be emulated in years to come when the series is opened for access.