The reports vary in length from one to more than one hundred typed pages. While they contain useful historical information, researchers should remember that the Survey Reports initially were created to order microfilm and not to be used as abstracts in place of the documents. Many Survey Reports, especially those for substantial and well-organized manuscript collections that contain Virginia material on virtually every page, are brief: for example, Survey Report No. 1 describes a manuscript of 238 folios in fewer than one hundred fifty words. The Survey Reports refer to printed or manuscript finding aids, but project agents worked in the foreign repositories and wrote their reports after examining the records themselves; the descriptions are not based upon catalog entries. Record groups examined by the project agents and found to contain no Virginia material were reported in what came to be called negative reports or series reports. For all the manuscripts collections they examined, the agents typed the following information at the beginning of every Survey Report: the name of the foreign depository; the class identification of the documents examined; a title assigned to the documents examined; the date, dates, or date range of the documents examined; bibliographical references consulted by the agent; the date on which the agent examined the documents; pages to be filmed that contain information about Virginia; and the number of microfilm exposures required. The agents then typed a description of the manuscripts, in greater or lesser detail as needed for microfilming, adding additional typed pages to each Survey Report as necessary. Information now found at the beginning of each report also includes the Survey Report number and microfilm reel number, which came to be assigned by project personnel in the United States. During the past three decades, two numbering systems were employed to organize the accumulated files of Survey Reports--which now total twenty-eight thousand typed pages--at the four participating institutions. From the 1950s through the mid-1960s, the agents had used alphabetical prefixes in numbers they assigned to Survey Reports from institutions outside London (the prefix X, for example, denoted collections at Oxford) and used only numerals for collections in Greater London; these numbers came to be known as old Survey Report numbers. In 1972, however, the VCRP committee determined to renumber all the Survey Reports in one consecutive numerical sequence and to remove 471 so-called negative reports from the file in preparation for indexing; these numbers came to be known as new Survey Report numbers. All incoming Survey Reports received after April 1972 were assigned numbers from this new sequence, but the old numbers also continued in use at several participating institutions and, of course, had been printed in citations and footnotes by scholars who used VCRP materials. Four other developments also shaped the arrangement or description of Virginia Colonial Records Project materials. The first was that to keep the old and new numbers straight at the four participating institutions, Robert M. Ours began the compilation of an unpublished "Guide to Survey Reports and Film" that, as expanded by his successors John Davenport Neville and Daphne Gentry, provided the raw material for A KEY TO SURVEY REPORTS AND MICROFILM OF THE VIRGINIA COLONIAL RECORDS PROJECT. The second was that in the mid-1970s the project directors stopped ordering microfilm copies of all surveyed documents, with the result that today the project does not have microfilm for the manuscripts described by about one-third of the Survey Reports. In 1983 and 1984 the State Library microfilmed the file of renumbered Survey Reports (from which negative reports had been removed in 1972). Reliance on this microfilm by a part-time agent in Great Britain prompted the reexamination of some collections and the occasional discovery of Virginia material not earlier reported. The final development came in 1974 when the United Kingdom restructured its local governments, creating some new counties and realigning others. The ten major elements of the typical Virginia Colonial Records Project Survey Report are new survey report number, old survey report number, depository, class, title, date or dates, references, reel number, exposures, and description.
