Agency Name: Maryland State Archives

Project Contact Person: Dr. Edward C. Papenfuse, State Archivist

Address: 350 Rowe Boulevard, Annapolis, MD 21401

Telephone: (410) 974-3867 Fax: (410) 974-3895

Brief Project Description:  Maryland Legal History On-Line.

The purpose of this project is to create a scanning and teaching environment at the Maryland State Archives to provide on-line access to the constitutional, legal, legislative, and administrative basis of Maryland government.

Funds are requested to apply innovative technology to the delivery of information vital to the functioning of State government. The funds will be used to create a state-of-the-art facility in which the Archives will scan and index fragile and rapidly deteriorating original records. This  facility also will be a user-friendly teaching environment in which state employees and citizens alike will learn how best to use this new electronic resource.

The Archives proposes to create an on-line resource for legal research that encompasses the session laws, proceedings of the General Assembly, Constitutional Conventions and historical editions of the annotated code, and ultimately all court decisions as they relate to constitutional issues. This on-line archive of public records will be created from scanned images of the published records. These scanned images will be converted to ASCII files through optical character recognition programs. The data will be accessed through a web-based text search retrieval function on the State Archives' web site. Users will be able to inquire of the system, find links to references, access the desired information, and view the original images to verify authenticity of the data over the internet and the State's Executive Information System on the State's intranet.

Such a resource is greatly needed by government, the legal community, and our citizens who seek to understand the development of Maryland's Constitution and Maryland law. By accessing this information on line at the Maryland State Archives web site users will be able to research quickly and easily such topics as:  legislative intent, legal precedents, the full text of any law, and the particulars of any constitutional issue as it was written into law and by successive Maryland Constitutions from 1776 onward. By undertaking this project the State Archives will also be preserving in electronic form, records that are scattered among a number of repositories and  currently exist only on rapidly disintegrating paper that will not be available for future generations.

Signature: ____________________________________________ Date: __________________

For Chief of Staff Office Use

Action Taken and Date: _________________________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________________________

Attachments
Extent of Need (Form 2)
Project Description (Form 3)
Plan of Operation  (Form 4)
Hardware Request (Form 5-1)
Software Request  (Form 5-2)
Network Request  (Form 5-3)
Other Costs (Form 5-4)
Funding Distribution  (Form 5-5)
Addendum: Estimate of Pages to be Scanned

Maryland State Archives
December 18, 1997

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