ABSTRACT
Presidential, prime ministerial, as well as foreign, finance and other ministry archives, and even personal papers of participants, are a significant source of further Group of Seven/Group of Eight (G7/G8) information. These archives will yield the best and most reliable record of G7/G8 meetings, especially if note-takers at the meetings were accurate and comprehensive in their work. There is a large and growing corpus of writings about various aspects of the G7/G8: scholarly analyses; compilations of texts of documents, often accompanied by additional material of reference value; government publications, including parliamentary reviews in summit countries. Although the documents released by the G7/G8 system are the primary source material for studying that institution, especially when examined together with the transcripts of appropriate press conferences and briefings, one must look beyond those sources to complementary information. National archives, academic and journalistic writings about the G7/G8, and memoirs and other works by summit participants complete the picture.
