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A Revolution in Archives, continued from page 11
should be online before the end of this summer), a wonderful set of transcriptions of
seventeenth-century county records provided by a volunteer in New Jersey, working from
film that is, at best, difficult to read, several document packets for classroom use, and
plats.net.
Because of very limited resources the choice of new volumes to add are the result of
decisions made by the editorial staff of the project, particularly in response to current
research needs of the several branches of state government. Among the records included
are the proceedings of every constitutional convention, all volumes of the Maryland
Manual, records of the comptroller's office, all extant compilations of legislative acts, and
selected monographs related to the operations of various government offices and agencies,
such as the legislature, the comptroller's office, the courts, and the land office.
Our progress to date (as of January 1, 2001) can be. summarized by record category as
follows:
Archives of Maryland: 72 volumes in print, 43,940 original images and text
Early State Records microfilm: 113,600 original images total
Code Compilations: 47,600 original images (some overlap with ESR)
Constitutional Conventions: 17,000 original images
Session Laws, 1634—: 94,191 of 306,000 remaining
Senate Journals, 1634—: 104,927 of 244,800 remaining
House Journals, 1634—: 151,379 of 299,200 remaining
Maryland Manuals 1889—present, and" individual works such as Bacon's Laws (1765),
John Kilty's The Land-holder's Assistant (1808), and Michael Dalton's The Country
Justice (1690).
Archives of Maryland Online is in the FY 2002 budget for $55,000, and we expect to have
527,540 images of record material online by the end of the fiscal year. When the first phase
of the projected work is completed in FY 2005, over one million images will be available,
providing access to all the documents which form the legal and administrative basis for
Maryland government. The anticipated workload for FY 2002 includes: Proceedings of
the House and Senate from 1870—1900, Session Laws from 1870-1900, and completing
acquisition of early codes. Since the site archivesofmaryland.net was launched in October
1999, use has grown to 180,000 requests per month and is expected to reach almost four
million during FY 2002. Funding at the level of 855,000 per year allows for scanning and
converting to text 73,000 pages but not for the purchase of improved scanning hardware
or OCR conversion software that could dramatically lower the per-page cost of OCR
conversion.
While the advent of the web has created the context for an archival revolution in
Maryland, it takes people with near fanatical devotion to a cause to make a revolution a
reality. Our revolution would not have been possible without the hard work and
dedication of a small staff. Programming began with the contributions of a high school