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On 14 December 1829 Sir Robert Peel wrote to Lord Aberdeen: "I confess to you that I doubt the policy of giving such unrestricted access to American writers to our State Papers. ... I can readily believe that it might serve powerfully to confirm an anti-English feeling even in the present day. Is it fair," he went on, "towards the descendants of those who favoured the mother country and adhered to her cause to disclose the communications which they have had with the British government? . . . Huskisson when he was Secretary of State gave facilities to another American writer to inspect the correspondence in the State Paper Office of which he soon found reason to repent. " But times have changed and in this century strenuous efforts have been made to make the contents of British libraries and record offices easily available to students of American history and Anglo-American affairs. Under the auspices of the Carnegie Institution of Washington DC, four volumes of Guides to material in Great Britain edited by Charles M. Andrews and Frances G. Davenport, by Charles Andrews, and by Charles O. Paullin and Frederic L. Paxson were pub lished between 1908 and 1914 and for long were an invaluable resource not only for the purpose for which they were immediately designed but as more general guides to manuscript materials in British repositories. Then in the late 1950s the British Association for American Studies, with the help of a generous grant from the United States Information Service in Great Britain, engaged a research team which began as two people and ended with five working full-time to make a survey of the sources for American studies in Great Britain and Ireland. The result, published in 1961 by Oxford University Press, price four guineas, was Bernard R. Crick and Miriam Alman, A Guide to Manuscripts Relating to America in Great Britain and Ireland. Now, eighteen years later, a successor which bears the same title as the earlier volume has appeared. The new Guide lists over 300,000 documents concerned with the history and literature of the American colonies and the United States held in repositories and

The term ‘industrial archaeology’, first put into print by Michael Rix in 1955, has since been widely adopted throughout the world to describe the identification, recording, and, where appropriate, preservation of the structures, artifacts and sites of past economic and social activity. The character, topical coverage and time‐range of the term are considered and then the varying ways by which recording and preservation are carried out in different parts of the world are described. The third section of the paper discusses the way in which IA is organized in different countries, contrasting particularly the grassroots organization adopted in Britain and some other countries with the centralized model followed elswhere. A select bibliography is appended.