Do you want to keep official publications available to the general public? or can you rely on finding what you need online without any need for print? We believe print is essential for the following reasons:

• Large documents being hard to deal with online, e.g. Leveson Inquiry, Mid Staffs Report

• Users who are older who are not used to using computers

• Users who have poor computer skills – we can get out a book for them, but we do not have much time to show them how to find things online

• People who don’t have computers who want to take things home to read – if they had to print off the documents, it would be very costly.

• People who are studying and want a pile of books to browse and to have open at the same time – much easier with a pile of books than with lots of computerised documents

• Some information is much easier to find in a book than it is online – e.g. Annual Abstract of statistics – the spreadsheets are huge and very difficult to manage online, but once it is distilled down to A4 pages it’s much easier to use

• You cannot inspire people if you just say “it’s online”, whereas if you can show them a pile of books and they can instantly see the format – e.g. House Of Commons Papers which have verbatim reports and oral and written evidence – they can see how accessible they are – and they’re excellent as primary evidence for students

• Many of our catalogue records already have links to the online documents – yet people still choose to borrow them, which speaks for itself

For a lot of authorities, the only way they can afford the materials is by taking advantage of the subsidy.

Please sign this petition if you are in agreement - we will then send it to the National Archives in the hope of stopping this cut.

Full details of the changes can be found at -http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/information-management/pls-changes-letter-march-2015-website.pdf