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Martin Taylor complains that less than a quarter of the HMC Commissioners are professional archivists. This is true, but what does it portend? HMC is not, and was never intended to be, a strictly representative body (of which the profession already has several: ACALG, ACW, NCA, Society of Archivists, etc). Rather, it is a body appointed by the Crown to discover the nature and whereabouts of archive sources, to disseminate information about them, to give independent advice on issues concerning them, and in general to be a 'watchdog'on behalf of the British people with regard to the protection of the sources for their history. Until the 1980s the composition of the Commissioners (who by the way are appointed not by HMC itself but by the Crown on the advice of the Secretary of State and the Prime Minister) was almost exclusively a mixture of private owners of archives and distinguished historians. Practising professional archivists were excluded almost as a matter of policy, on the grounds that there could be a conflict of interest when it came to discussing such issues as the allocation of manuscripts to a particular institution in lieu of tax. Those traditional constituencies - owners and historians - are still well represented among the present Commissioners, whose remit covers the whole of the United Kingdom. But in individual cases they are nowadays almost always linked with other attributes such as a wide awareness of and involvement in public life (Parliament, business, academe, the church, local government, the law and so on). In recent times, however, with new rules as to conflict of interest firmly in place there has been a quite deliberate - and from our point of view very welcome - drive to increase the proportion of Commissioners who are practising archivists. When you add to their experience that of the Commission's staff, a fair proportion of whom (including, as it happens, myself as the chief executive) are qualified archivists, the profession can be confident that its concerns are now very strongly represented at Commissioners' meetings. Chris Kitching Secretary HMC Dr CJ KITCHING Secretary, Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts Quality House, Quality Court, Chancery Lane London WC2A 1HP United Kingdom [log in to unmask] Tel. 020 7242 1198 Fax 020 7831 3550 %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%