In pragmatic terms, funding from the Packard Foundation would expedite the transcription of thousands of documents waiting to be put on disk in the WPP offices. Further, since the costs of collecting, editing, and converting the Founding Fathers documents into letterpress editions were running into the millions of dollars, and the considerable staffs involved in all of these projects were devoting their careers to producing the work, the Packard Foundation's suggestion had a revolutionary aspect: Transcriptions of the entire corpus of the Founding Fathers papers would be available on CD-ROM to public and college libraries, even high schools, at a fraction of the cost-- $100-$150 for the annual license fee--to produce a limited university press run of 1,000 of each volume of the published papers at $45-$150 per printed volume. Given the current budget crunch in educational systems and the corresponding constraints on librarians in smaller institutions who wish to add these volumes to their collections, producing the documents on CD-ROM would likely open a greatly expanded audience for the papers. TWOHIG stressed, however, that development of the Founding Fathers CD-ROM is still in its infancy. Serious software problems remain to be resolved before the material can be put into readable form. Funding from the Packard Foundation resulted in a major push to transcribe the 75,000 or so documents of the Washington papers remaining to be transcribed onto computer disks. Slides illustrated several of the problems encountered, for example, the present inability of CD-ROM to indicate the cross-outs (deleted material) in eighteenth century documents. TWOHIG next described documents from various periods in the eighteenth century that have been transcribed in chronological order and delivered to the Packard offices in California, where they are converted to the CD-ROM, a process that is expected to consume five years to complete (that is, reckoning from David Packard's suggestion made several years ago, until about July 1994). TWOHIG found an encouraging indication of the project's benefits in the ongoing use made by scholars of the search functions of the CD-ROM, particularly in reducing the time spent in manually turning the pages of the Washington papers.