A number of issues have been raised and some answered, such as the cost of an EGM but the question "What would an EGM achieve" has not. April asked >Do the byelaws preclude emails (to those who have the facility)? At the moment we are obliged to give notice by post to ALL members and we may in the future change the rules to allow email notice. However, at the moment it is not practical to do so and probably will not be for some time. There are two main reasons for this. The membership secretary has a number of email addresses on file, but we have no way of knowing which are current, if we were to use those then many members would not receive the notice. Members forget to change address on the list, though active members are prety good about this. Casual email users usually forget to notify the membership secretary. This mailing list has only around three and a half percent of the total membership and have currently active and reliable email addresses. The cost of updating the membership files to show that they have been emailed would probably outweigh the postal cost involved. If the percentage of reliable email addresses were much higher then the possibility would be there, with the remaining risk that some members would not receive the notice. Thank you to Edna for posting some of the facts which does allow us to assess the value of these records. The key elements (assuming the details to be correct) are that less than one and a half percent of the card have addresses on the back and only a percentage of these are not found within the man's service or pension documents preserved at The National Archives. Also 143 cabinets would require 340 square feet of storage space with the cabinets packed together or at least 600 to 660 sq ft to allow access. This would take a large part of the downstairs library space where the computers and microform readers are located if the Society were to acquire them. Then there is the removal costs and a large project to sort out the cards requiring filming. It took many months for a full-time team of filmers to do the Society Great-Card Index which (if memory serves) was a quarter of the size. A good enough case needs to be made for the retention of the cards to justify this large project. This is not an official reply but simply my views on the subject. Geoff Geoffrey T. Stone, SoG Mailing List Administrator. lists@sog.org.uk http://www.sog.org.uk