ARCHIVIST OF THE HALL OF RECORDS 31

Fiscal year 1950 .......................... 1,113

Fiscal year 1951 .......................... 1,026

Fiscal year 1952 .......................... 1,190

Requests for information came from forty states, the District of
Columbia and two foreign countries.

It is relatively easy to compile statistics on visitors, letters and the use
of documents because in each case the user, by signing the register or the call
slip or his own letter, makes the record himself. To keep an account of the
calls for information which come by telephone is more difficult. In a large
office a clerk could be assigned to a task of this kind but in a small institu-
tion like ours this is not possible. We recall 125 such calls during the past
year, we do not know how many others there were which were not put in
writing.

REPAIR AND BINDING

The Manuscript Repair Department was able to maintain—and to
surpass—the high level of production of the past two years. Both repair
workers are now thoroughly experienced, and Mrs. Jane R. Moss, who retired
in December 1949, continues to give us one day of volunteer work weekly.
As the list below will show, we are now spending most of our effort on
the county records which have been acquired by the Hall of Records dur-
ing the last few years. The Recorded Wills of the colonial Probate Court
took second place as in the previous year. This series was not done earlier,
along with the other probate records, because the special binding materials
required were not available during the war and for several years thereafter.
In third place are the records of the State government which have for long
been in bad condition but which were relatively little used.

It has always been our feeling that the quality of our repair work,
primarily lamination, was excellent—perhaps unsurpassed by any other
archival establishment. We have never been sure, however, of the quantity
because there are so few workshops like ours, and where they do exist,
production figures are not readily available. We are, however, certain that
we are doing more in each succeeding year; and lacking a relative standard,
we take comfort in our own improvement. We increased our output by
3,000 pages in the last fiscal year.