Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/504

 494 Providence Meeting of the Hshed records of the original thirteen states to 1789. and of such local records as have been printed in any of the states. Mr. Luther R. Kelker, custodian of public records for the state of Pennsylvania, described the work which he has done in that office since his appointment in 1903, and the principles which he has followed in the arrangement of the material confided to him. Beside such work of arrangement, he has prepared copy for the fifth and sixth series of the Pennsylvania Archives. Mr. Clayton Torrence of the Virginia State Library described the archives of that state, including the portions which are in charge of the li- brary, the land-office, the office of the secretary of state and the other executive offices, and the work which is being done toward putting them in order and making their contents available to his- torical students. In 1906 the Department of Archives and History was established, in charge of Mr. H. J. Eckenrode. The early petitions and other legislative papers have been sorted, and a calen- dar of the petitions is now in preparation. Mr. Torrence dwelt also on the county archives, the progressive losses of these treas- ures by fire, and the need of better treatment of the problems con- nected with them. Mr. John C. Parish of the State L^niversity of Iowa spoke of the work which has lately been carried on in con- nection with the public archives of that state, under the direction of Professor Shambaugh, and especially described the system of classification which has been adopted. The unprinted material is first classified according to three periods: the territorial, that of the first state constitution, and that of the present constitution (since 1857). For each of these the classification is according to the various offices from which the papers respectively emanated, then in subdivisions according to the external character of the documents (letters, reports, accounts, vouchers, etc.), then in still further subdivisions of a topical sort, in each of which the arrange- ment is chronological. It is proposed to issue calendars of various classes and to prepare a catalogue and an index to the whole mass. Mr. Worthington C. Ford, chief of the division of manu- scripts in the Library of Congress, spoke briefly of the effect of sunlight on manuscripts exposed for exhibition or for other pur- poses, and described an ingenious device which, with the aid of the Bureau of Standards at Washington, he had prepared for measuring the extent of such damage. The consideration of the marking of historic sites was opened by Professor Henry E. Bourne of Western Reserve University, in a paper in which he discussed the utility of such procedure