"What the scholars miss is that the issue of access is crucial, and without calendars, the semi-skilled historian or the pure amateur have no way of accessing the material, and with the emphasis on open access, calendars are vital tools, however inaccurate or defective."

"I think Charles Knighton makes a strong case, though I suppose in many of the instances we are considering - though not all, e.g. State Papers for the early 18th century - the issue is less calendar v no calendar than new calendar v existing inadequate calendar, which can partly fulfil the initial guide function he identifies. Part of the issue too is presumably the Research Assessment Exercise status of calendaring, as there is potentially the problem that an academic doing useful calendaring work (even overseeing others in a funded resource-enhancement project doing it) is seen either to be doing second-class work compared with monograph and article-writing or to be doing something so long-term that it doesn't readily fit the Research Assessment Exercise cycle."

"Charles Knighton’s case for the calendar is, of course, a strong one (in an academic sense). The problem, as we know, is that the process of calendaring is hopelessly uneconomic. The costs of printing the calendars, let alone preparing them, render them prohibitively expensive. There may be a case for calendaring very high usage material - but I cannot see that this applies now to early-modern materials .... My view of calendaring has hardened as I have seen the academic monograph market collapse. We should be grateful for what was achieved in the past, make sure that it is widely available, and accept that what little is done from now on will be mostly in the form of entries, perhaps expanded, in the Catalogue or variants of the Catalogue."

"I've read Charles Knighton's paper with much interest, and I wholly agree about preferring the codex to the screen. Also about the durability of print as compared with a website. However, he brushes over some of the main problems associated with calendaring documents by brief abstracts. Such abstracts are always likely to be biased towards the political detail in the document: the category "substantive" is, alas, always in the mind of the beholder. The best example of this is probably the exclusion of virtually all material dealing with family and gender from the various Calendar of State Papers Domestic volumes: these matters were deemed unimportant by their original calendarers. On the Wellcome Foundation project "The Health of the Cecils" we have similarly found that large quantities of material relating to ill-health/diet/medical problems, frequently put at the end of a letter, were likewise excluded. The State Papers Foreign contain unexpectedly large quantities of this material included in letters to ambassadors. So, as historical studies move on, the calendar becomes more and more the preserve of political historians such as Charles. But The National Archives cannot really afford to take such a narrow view of early modern source material."

"I too would be reluctant to see the calendars go. Whilst I am sure that the web will replace microfilm as the primary means of access to some record series for those working at a distance, and for heavily used series will become the primary means of access, without some guidance this isn't actually much different to allowing people to rummage through an unsorted box of documents. ...We also need to recall that not all potential users have the language and palaeographic skills to access the material even if we assume they have web access."

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