Calendar: 1968-1969 Page 381

Annual Report of the Delegacy xxxix risen by 625 per cent during the past four years caused concern parti- cularly in the financial situation which faced the Library Committee during most of the session Economies were already being practised in shelving considerable proportion of less-used books unbound but it was clearly necessary to economise further by lowering the standard of the binding done and perhaps by instituting deliberate policy of leaving certain periodicals unbound The Trustees of the Centre for Military Archives learned at the beginning of the session that the British Records Association had criticised the proliferation of specialised archive repositories especially in the field of military archives and had sought the co-operation of the University Grants Committee with view to consultation with the Association in the event of any university seeking to introduce an archive-collecting project The College responded to this criticism through the medium of letter from the Librarian to the Association's journal Archives explaining that the Centre had been established at King's only when it had become obvious that there were many collec- tions of military papers in private hands which were in grave danger of being destroyed or dispersed and thus lost to posterity that the College possessing as it does the only university department of War Studies in the country felt it necessary to ensure the preservation of such papers for the benefit of future military historians and that there was evidence that many private owners were reluctant to hand their papers over to an official repository because of the sensitive nature of their content It was further pointed out that King's was not collecting material in the primary fields of interest of the Army museums and that the Centre's holdings were reported to the National Register of Ar- chives Accessions to the Centre during the year include the deposit of the main body of Lord Ismay's papers and the papers of Major-General Η Dimoline The success of the Centre has led the Leverhulme Trust Fund most generously to make an exception to its usual practice and allot further grant to the College to cover the archivist's salary for two more years Lack of space for the Library became an even more acute problem following the evacuation of its main store to allow building operations to begin in the Strand and the situation will not be improved materi- ally until the new building is completed and the first stage of the new Library occupied though some amelioration of the position can be expected when the extension of the University's library depository at Egham is ready to take more of the less-used material at present housed