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Patrick asks to what extent REED is presently available in electronic form. The answer is to a limited extent. To quote my favourite character in one of my favourite films: "Let me 'splain... No, that take too long... Let me sum up" Until Lancashire, it was not possible for us to make an electronic form of the final text, the one which was typeset, available to anyone, either because it didn't exist in an electronic form (when we were still typesetting on Mag-card Composers) or existed only under a proprietary operating system (when we typeset on a Linotype phototypesetter). What we have made available from that period are earlier stages in the editing process, that is, the versions of the text used to generate the concordances which we use for glossing and indexing. It is a stage prior to first proof and contains embedded COCOA-style headers and some mark-up coding. These texts are available for bona fide researchers from OTA and the Text Archive at CCH here at UofT, but they really need to be used only in close comparison to the published texts for obvious reasons. REED explicitly retains its copyright. Such texts exist for Herefordshire/Worcestershire, Devon, Cumberlandshire/ Westmorlandshire/Gloucestershire, Norwich 2, and Newcastle. The pre-Newcastle collections (York, Coventry, Chester) existed in electronic form only on a reel of magnetic tape stored in the Sir Sandford Fleming Building which was damaged in a fire..... Cambridge changed so much, due to research undertaken subsequent to the concordance run, that we didn't think it was fair to make an earlier version available even with provisos. We had hoped to scan those four texts but have not yet had the resources to devote to that effort. With Lancashire, we began a new era, typesetting on a Mac, and theoretically it is possible to retrieve the text from the Mac, put it back on the PC and make it available to the two text archives in ASCII format, but I confess that there simply hasn't been time. Now, all this applies to records text only. None of the apparatus or modern prose sections of the volumes have ever been made available in electronic form by us. There are discussions going on right now between the REED Executive and the University of Toronto Press about possible electronic publication of the series and naturally REED wouldn't do anything "unilateral" while those discussions are still going on. I will make this electronic discussion available to those who will be involved, since I think that the community of potential users of HyperREED or Electronic REED is a valuable resource.... Patrick also makes mention of SGML, the Standardised General Mark-up Language. I think it is a very good thing to adopt for anything made publicly or commercially available. Before there was TEI or (I think) SGML, a mark-up system was developed for REED by Willard McCarty (who then worked here); Bill Rowcliffe, our typesetter; and myself. It delimits or describes fount changes, note text, and various codicological features; represents non-Roman characters; and encodes abbreviated document headings and manuscript designations. We use a series of preprocessing programs (which I wrote) to convert to COCOA-style headers and a simplified mark-up for the concordance and to convert to typesetting codes. It would probably be a relatively simple task to convert to SGML also. I hope this explanation isn't too detailed, but I wanted to respond to Patrick's points as clearly as possible. Abigail