ARCHIVIST OF THE HALL OF RECORDS 39

decision, but since space is now failing the decision must be made,
for if it is decided that our responsibility is that of a true archival
agency and covers all of the records of the State, then provision
must be made for housing these records. Recently the Board of
Public Works, finding the cost of housing records in Baltimore of-
fices intolerably uneconomical, granted funds to the Director of Bud-
get and Procurement for the rehabilitation of a tobacco warehouse
in which non-current records might be kept. This is obviously a
stop-gap measure and should not be continued too long, for unat-
tended records will always disappear in the end. They should be
destroyed to begin with, if they are not worth keeping, or special
housing and attention should be provided for them. The Archivist
recommends that such record storage space be provided either in
the new office building which is contemplated for Baltimore, or in
a separate specially constructed building. This record storage space
should be controlled by the Hall of Records Commission or some
other agency set up exclusively for this purpose by the Legislature.

Repair of Records

On many occasions the Archivist has been asked to provide re-
pair facilities for those governmental records which will remain in
the county seats or in the offices of State government. It has not
been possible to do this because of the limited funds and personnel
at the Hall of Records. Unfortunately, nowhere else in the State
can this work be done; therefore, the county officer must either have
the job done by amateurs—usually so badly that it would have been
better to have done nothing at all—or he must resign himself to the
thought of having the records disappear little by little. A compro-
mise program, and one very often found in Maryland, is for the re-
cord to be withdrawn from circulation. While this device helps
somewhat to preserve records, it makes them utterly useless, and
besides it violates those salutary laws which require a record cus-
todian to make records available to all legitimate researchers.

An ideal solution to this problem would be for the State to re-
quire such repair work to be done at the Hall of Records. The e-
quipment and the technique already exist here. An additional
worker and a small appropriation for materials would put this plan
into operation immediately. An additional advantage in having the