Good luck Edmund.
Here are my thoughts.
My UA takes in parts of historic Northamptonshire, Huntingdonshire,
Cambridgeshire, and two sub-county (but nonetheless extremely significant)
historic administrative areas of the Isle of Ely and Soke of Peterborough -
these were originally based on monastic liberty and generated their own law,
paperwork, documentary history, etc.
The sequence is as follows (please feel free to skip this bit !!!):
The Soke of Peterborough was part of Northamptonshire from before 1086 to
1888.
In 1888 the Soke of Peterborough became an administrative county in its own
right.
In 1965 The Soke of Peterborough was merged with the pre-1086 county of
Huntingdonshire to form the county of Peterborough and Huntingdonshire.
In 1974 the modern county of Cambridgeshire was created from the county of
Peterborough and Huntingdonshire , Cambridgeshire and the Isle of Ely.
In 1998 Peterborough City Council Unitary Authority was created (largely)
from the old District of Peterborough within the post-1974 county of
Cambridgeshire.
Archaeological work for this area has been published fairly equally in
Northamptonshire journals and in Cambridgeshire journals. Documentary
materials are split between Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, and
Northamptonshire Record Offices, Diocese of Peterborough and Diocese of Ely.

In my experience, some local folk and people further afield still
'romantically' identify with historic Huntingdonshire and Northamptonshire,
Isle of Ely/Cambridgeshire fens, and there is a slightly less romantic
(administrative) perception of post-1974 Cambridgeshire amongst locals and
specialists outside the area. Perception of Peterborough as Unitary
Authority is fairly strong locally and growing elsewhere, but I still find
that some agencies and individuals are confused about the admin relationship
between Cambridgeshire County Council and Peterborough U.A..

My points about historic/archaeological information retrieval for this area
are:

1. Staff here know the complex admin background, so can point enquirers to
the relevant sources. In order to do this successfully we need to know the
enquirer's theme of enquiry and not just the enquiry's spatial and temporal
constraints. The expression of admin background is entirely customised to
suit the enquirer's question.
2. It is extremely unhelpful for enquirers from administrative, resource
management, developer, etc. backgrounds not to approach enquiries from the
perspective of the current Unitary Authority boundaries. Old
counties/ceremonial counties are very very misleading to these enquirer
groups.
3. Unitary Authorities should not be considered as Districts within Counties
for admin/data organisation purposes.
4. Post-1974 Cambs. has no real historic integrity and it is increasingly
unlikely that a research enquiry would take this as a sole unit of study.
5. Lingering perception of 1974 reorganisation will be lost with time. For
example, nobody really cares about the short-lived county of  Peterborough
and Huntingdonshire anymore.
6. I would drop the idea of ceremonial counties altogether (after all, what
do they really mean historically ?) and use two hierarchically equal
identifiers to provide sufficient user choice: 'current administrative
counties/unitaries' (with Districts etc. as a sub-group of counties) and
'historic counties' . Personally, for the latter I would prefer to go for
1888 or even pre-1888 rather than 1974, because it relates more closely to
most of the source material we are dealing with.

I do understand that this may be extremely difficult to achieve nationally !

Whatever happens the decision has to be bold and consistently applied - one
thing or the other. Compromise will only confuse the end user even more.
After all you are going to upset loads of people whatever you propose !

Cheers,
Ben Robinson


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