Samuel Phillips Data Bank in parliamentary procedure.

• Author: Proulx, Mathieu

Parliamentary institutions in Canada and Quebec are based on the British model. Our history in the new world bequeathed to us structures and principles which we have adapted over the years to suit our own needs. Even today we refer frequently to the rules of procedure in use at Westminster and to commentaries on those rules. We also look at the decisions and practices of other Canadian legislatures and from time to time at precedents established in other Commonwealth parliaments.

Contacts between Clerks of these parliaments are one way to obtain information about parliamentary procedure. There is also an incredible variety of books and periodicals available but the sheer abundance of the documentation can become burdensome to keep on library shelves or in filing cabinets. Furthermore it may not be consulted as much as it should if it is not suitably structured. This problem of records management led the National Assembly to initiate a pilot project to be carried out by its Procedural Research Branch.

Problems with storing and locating documentation had been identified: the traditional documentation chain and more precise indexing were no longer enough to keep up with the ever-expanding mountain of documents. Getting information to the people who needed it, often urgently, was slowed down by the time required to trace the relevant documentation. The pilot project proved to be a success, and the Data Bank was inaugurated by the President of the Assembly on April 28, 1994.

The choice of software for the data bank was made on the basis of a recommendation by an in-house task force. The choice of product and of computer environment was made very judiciously and only after considerable investigation of the possibilities. Because the data bank would have to be an effective documentation strategy for the future while solving the problems already identified, the computer support selected would have to be highly efficient at retrieving information, user friendly and adapted to performing within an overall documentation strategy for the Assembly. The software chosen was CDR, produced by a small Quebec firm called CEDROM Technologies Inc., which seems firmly committed to staying on the leading edge of a sector known for its rapid evolution.

CDR is a data-bank software allowing for whole-text searches, in other words a search may be made for any word in a text as well as on the basis of predetermined criteria. Documents entered in the bank can be in either French or English, it makes no difference. CDR comes with what is known as "hypertext-link capability", which allows the making of connections among documents in the data bank. Using hypertext links, a researcher can consult several documents simultaneously, as though he were sitting at a table in a library with books spread out around him. The software has two modules, CDA, which builds the...