Records of the College and its antecedent associ

ations include a wealth of material on the formu lation of psychiatric policy dating from 1841. Enquiries concerning this information make up ahigh proportion of the College Library's usage. These data are in the form of minutes of meetings of the institution. As they had never been indexed and were consequently extremely difficult to access, it was agreed that a database be developed by the Library staff to store and facilitate the dissemination of the information. The project was tackled in two stages, the first being the 'current ' material, i.e. from 1971when the RM PA obtained its Collegiate status. The second stage was to be the creation of an archival database emphasising the historical content of the material. Stage 1: The Policy Index 1971-Our brief was to develop an in-house online database using the existing ICL System 25 mini computer and Apex software- the only system available in the College. The data were to be compiled from the min utes of the College Council and Executive and Finance Committee meetings, these meetings being the source of all major College policies, guidelines, statements, etc. It soon became apparent that the flexibility of the database would be limited by the constraints of the software system-the main problem being that searchable fields were limited to 50 characters. To overcome this, the original plan to treat each meeting as a separate record was abandoned and a subject approach was followed. Thus, each new topic discussed at a meeting was treated as an individual record. Each record was divided initially into three searchable fields of up to 50 characters in length and one text field of unlimited size. A typical record being