The closure of the office of the Oxford Colonial Records Project, the retirement of J. J. Tawney who had been its director for the ten years of the Project's existence and the disbanding of the Project's Committee were an important stage in what had always been seen as a task of limited duration, the searching out, collection and deposit in Rhodes House Library, Oxford of the private papers of people who had served in the colonial empire. At the end of 1972, the Committee saw its work as having reached a point where it could be more closely integrated with the work of Rhodes House Library, the Commonwealth African and American section of the Bodleian Library which undertook to continue any uncompleted work of collection alongside the task it had had from the beginning of making the collections available to scholars and preserving for future use in conditions of adequate security those groups of papers which had been given on the understanding that they were not immediately accessible.