This document serves as the final report to the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) of the work of the Midwest State Archives Guide Project. The project involved the state archives in Minnesota, Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin, and was expected to contribute to a projected national guide project database, though when the project began there had been little systematic planning for a national information system outside of the NHPRC staff. This report describes the purposes of the project, its successes, and its problems, and examines alternative approaches to an archival descriptive database. It also addresses the goals of the project as described in the grant application, and notes how outside events made some of the goals irrelevant, or caused the project team to change their emphasis. Appendices, which make up more than half of the document, comprise: (1) Publications and Papers Generated from Participation in the Midwest State Archives Guide Project; (2) A Comparison of Natural Language Access and Assigned Term Indexing; (3) Data Base Design; (4) Style Sheet; (5) Data Entry Forms Used during the Project; (6) Illinois County Records Approach and Data Base Design; and (7) Sample of Wisconsin and Minnesota Reports. (THC)