Index to Subject Matter of Victorian Legislation

Index to Subject Matter of Victorian Legislation (Australia)

The Index to the Subject Matter of Victorian Legislation is a general subject guide to Victorian Acts and Statutory Rules that has been published annually since 1999. (1) The index is currently available in hard copy only. Fewer than 250 copies are published each year. There has been some thought given to developing an interactive, enquiry-based internet version with hyperlinks to the Acts and statutory rules at some time in the future, but this is not currently underway.

Production and maintenance of the Victorian index

It took about 18 months of full time work by one compiler to produce the first edition of the index. The index and its supporting database were built up from scratch by reading every principal Act and statutory rule. Compiling the index involved selecting subject headings and assigning them to enactments. this task was made easier by the fact that Victorian legislation was available in electronic form, so it could be searched for common terminology across the entire statute
book, and subject headings could be refined depending on the abundance or
rarity of their usage.

The index is maintained and produced by means of a database, developed within the office of Chief Parliamentary Counsel, whereby a record is created for every principal Act and statutory rule and subject headings are assigned to the record.

The database behind the index is updated on an ongoing basis according to the legislative process. As new Acts and Statutory Rules are passed, they are entered into the database and assigned subject headings. Monthly checking processes also ensure the database’s accuracy and currency at any given time.

Layout of the Victorian index

The types of subjects that are included in the subject index include the main subjects of any piece of legislation, and other subjects dealt with substantially by the legislation and considered important enough to index, such as subjects of general interest, Legal concepts and some statutory bodies and proper nouns.

Also indexed are the main occurrences of certain common subjects that appear
in a number of different enactments.(2)

The subject index has about 4,000 subject headings. Victoria (Australia) has around 1,100
principal enactments (500 Acts and 600 statutory rules). Some enactments may be referred to under only one heading, while others, such as the Crimes Act, will appear under many relevant headings. locators are to individual enactments rather than, for instance, to section numbers. the index also contains crossreferencing and an alphabetical list of the Acts indexed in the current edition.

A typical entry consists of the following elements, arranged in alphabetical order
within each subgroup:
Subject heading;
See also references (if applicable);
titles of principal public Acts;
titles of principal statutory rules.

Notes

  1. Work on the index began in 1998, and the first edition was as at 1 September 1999. Subsequent editions, from 2001 onwards, are as at 1 January.
  2. Index to Subject Matter of Victorian Legislation: As at 1 January 2006 (7 ed, office of the Chief Parliamentary Counsel, Victoria, Australia, 2006) v.

See Also

Conclusion

Notes

See Also

References and Further Reading

About the Author/s and Reviewer/s

Author: international

Mentioned in these Entries

Badger’s General index, Curnin’s Index, Henry Smythies’ Analytical Digest, Index to the 1908 NZ Consolidated Statutes, Index to the Revised Statutes of Canada, Index volume of the 1931 NZ Reprint, Iowa Subject Index, Legal concepts, List of Australian Reports, Subject Index to South Australian Legislation, United Kingdom Index to the Statutes, United States Code Annotated.


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