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Dear Mr Childs, I was interested to note that in your email about Community Charge Registration Registration Enquiry Forms, you state that > 2. The data on the forms was entered onto the district council's mainframe. We > are not currently in a position to handle any of the digitised data. At the risk of banging our own drum, there are organisations which exist to preserve electronic data derived from database systems. We do so for central government datasets on behalf of the Public Record Office: see our web site (http://ndad.ulcc.ac.uk/). Although NDAD's contract is with the PRO, this does not preclude us from getting into relationships with other organisations (e.g. county record offices) which may not wish or be able to afford to develop the expertise and infrastructure required to preserve electronic data. The development of Internet access means that access to open data can be provided remotely: i.e. the potentially sensitive issue of sending data outside of one's area ceases to be relevant. Another organisation which plays a similar role to NDAD is the Data Archive at the University of Essex (http://dawww.essex.ac.uk/). Provided that all of the information from the forms was indeed entered onto a database, I would suggest that it would be better to concentrate your efforts on preserving the database and supporting documentation (e.g examples of completed forms, user manuals, code books, lookup tables). Preserving the electronic data will provide greater functionality in terms of future manipulation and analysis of the data than preserving the paper forms. The database will almost certainly be subject to the Data Protection Act: if you do decide to preserve the database, you will need to take this into account when deciding on access conditions. Peter Garrod ([log in to unmask]) Assistant Archivist UK National Digital Archive of Datasets (http://ndad.ulcc.ac.uk/) University of London Computer Centre, 20 Guilford Street, London WC1N 1DZ %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%