The Constitutional Assembly Database Project - Resurrecting a Database Ten Years On

In 1995 the Constitutional Assembly Database Project began to publish the proceedings of South Africa’s Constitutional Assembly on the internet. The Project finished this work, the first of its kind anywhere in the world, in 1996, but the Database has not been available since a computer crash in 2000. This paper is the first account of the history of the Project. The paper argues that it is important to restore access to the Database, but in a way that will not repeat the mistakes made when setting up the database.