DRAFT
Salvaging the Nearly Lost Art of Constitution Making: 
Documenting the Documents
By

Dr. Edward C. Papenfuse, 
Archivist of the State of Maryland
October 11, 2002
(not for quotation without the permission of the author)
I

There is a little known and studiously avoided provision in the Maryland State Constitution that “it shall be the duty of the General Assembly to provide by Law for taking, at the general election to be held in the year nineteen hundred and seventy, and every twenty years thereafter, the sense of the People in regard to calling a Convention for altering this Constitution; and if a majority of voters at such election or elections shall vote for a Convention, the General Assembly, at its next session, shall provide by Law for the assembling of such convention, and for the election of Delegates thereto.”  The last time Maryland held a Constitutional Convention was in 1967, the carefully honed product of which was soundly defeated at the polls the following year.  I remember that year well.  It was our first full year in Baltimore.  The weekend after Martin Luther King’s assassination we watched from the roof top of our row house apartment as Baltimore burned. 

Americans care little about writing and revising constitutions today.  Much of the passion, the art, of writing down in a comprehensive, meticulous fashion what good government means, and how it should function, has long been lost to issues out of context ranging from the right to bear arms to the right to life.  On June 28, 1776 Marylander Samuel Chase wrote our future President John Adams "I shall offer no other apology for concluding than that I am this moment from our House to procure an express …  with a Unan[imous] vote of our Convention for Independence. ... our people have fire if not smothered. ... Now for a government."

All the aspiring states rose to the challenge.  Maryland wrote its first state constitution between August and November 1776, hammering out a 42 article Declaration of Rights and a Form of Government with sixty provisions.  Today only a single copy exists of the first drafts of each, both buried in the papers of John Dickinson at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. They were sent to Dickinson by Samuel Chase for his comments and suggestions. Laying them side by side with the journals of the Convention and the surviving fragments of the proceedings of the committees of the whole as each article was debated, sometimes modified, and, in one rare instance, rejected, it is possible to reconstruct the passion and the process by which the final product was forged, possible that is, if the access to the documents is swift, accurate, and complete.

When final touches were added and the two documents promulgated, there was only a limited provision for amending and none for a new convention.  The language was clear.  “That this form of government, and the declaration of rights, and no part thereof, shall be altered, changed, or abolished, unless a bill so to alter , change, or abolish the same, shall pass the general Assembly, and be published at least three months before a new election, and shall be confirmed by the general assembly, after a new election of delegates, in the first session after such new election.”    This was followed by language decidedly peculiar unless you have spent some time in our State.  The peninsula between Delaware and Chesapeake Bays which Maryland shares with the States of Delaware and Virginia, known as the ‘Eastern Shore’ has always had an independent streak.  Their representatives found enough votes in the 1776 Constitutional Convention to add that “nothing in this form of government, which relates to the eastern shore particularly, shall at any time hereafter be altered, unless for the alteration and confirmation thereof, at least two thirds of all the members of each branch of the general assembly shall concur.”

How then did there come to be a provision that the electorate must be consulted every twenty years?  By 1850 there was sufficient unhappiness over the lack of representation from Baltimore City in the Maryland State House, that the General Assembly was at last persuaded to call a Constitutional Convention.  Once convened, after prolonged debate, a provision was adopted that: 
It shall be the duty of the Legislature, at its first session immediately succeeding the returns of every census of the United States, hereafter taken, to pass a law for ascertaining, at the next general election of Delegates, the sense of the people of Maryland in regard to the calling a Convention for altering the Constitution; and in case the majority of votes cast at said election shall be in favor of calling a Convention, the Legislature shall provide for assembling such Convention; 

The next Constitutional convention would not be called until late in the Civil War when Maryland finally got around to abolishing slavery. Adopted in 1864, the new Constitution not only provided that any proposed amendments be published in German (there had been a large influx of German speaking immigrants in the intervening years since the last Constitution was adopted), but that every twenty years beginning in 1882, the electorate should be polled on whether or not they wanted another chance to review the state’s fundamental laws.

Instead it would be only three years before another convention was called in 1867, a convention that perfunctorily renewed the 20 year rule, after which there was no serious call for review and reform for another 100 years. In the meantime, a Science Fiction writer from Massachusetts, Roger Sherman Hoar, in 1917, and a Professor at the University of Pittsburg, Francis Newton Thorpe, in 1909, studiously compiled reference works on the process of State Constitution making that were designed to make the task of revision more comparative and, possibly, easier.
Roger Sherman Hoar, a lawyer who preferred writing pulp fiction about his hero ‘Radio Man,’ found that seven states, Oklahoma,  Maryland, New Hampshire, Iowa, Michigan, New York, 
and Ohio, required the people be consulted regularly on whether or not a constitutional convention should be called. He did so in answer to the self-imposed question:

        [§2. Must legislatuve get popular approval for convention?]

     Most of the constitutions which contain provisions for the calling of conventions now provide that they be called after the legislature has submitted the question of a convention to the people and has obtained their approval, such a popular vote to be taken whenever the legislatures themselves may think proper. The first provisions of this character were those contained in the Delaware constitution of 1792, the Tennessee constitution of 1796, the Kentucky constitution of     1799, and the Ohio constitution of 1802. The Kentucky provision of 1799, which was substantially repeated in the constitution of 1850, threw great obstacles in the way of calling a convention, by requiring two successive popular votes; but this plan was not followed by other States except in the one case of the Louisiana constitution of 1812. The Kentucky constitution of 1891 discarded the requirement, but does require the vote of two successive general assemblies to propose the question to the people. The plan of permitting the legislature at its discretion to submit to the people the question of calling a constitutional convention, has for many years been the most popular one, and is now in force by the constitutions of twenty-five States.

     Some States do not even leave it to the discretion of the legislature as to when the people shall vote on the question of calling a convention, but specifically provide by their constitutions that popular votes shall be taken at definite intervals. There are now six States which require the periodical submission of this question. The constitutions of four of these permit the legislature to submit the question to the people at other than the regular periodical times. 
     {60} The Oklahoma constitution requires the legislature to submit the question at least once in every twenty years, leaving the particular time to the legislature's discretion.

     Thus the practice of obtaining the popular approval for the calling of a convention may be said to have become almost the settled rule. Thirty-two State constitutions require such a popular expression of approval, and even where it has not been expressly required, such a popular vote has been taken in a majority of cases in recent years.
 
     Maine and Georgia are the only States whose constitutions now provide for the holding of a constitutional convention, without also containing a provision for first obtaining the approval of the people. 
     In the case of these States it may be argued that the convention derives its authority from the legislature alone; although in the case of Maine it may well be argued that the convention derives its authority from popular acquiescence, as manifested in the failure of the people to circulate a referendum petition; and in both cases it might possibly be argued (on the analogy of the Pennsylvania decision to be discussed a little later in this chapter) that the people ratify the legislative statute by participating in the election of delegates under it.

In the case of the thirty-two State constitutions which require a popular vote in advance of calling the convention, it may be contended that the people call the convention under a permission graciously conferred on them by the constitution, but the Delaware, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Florida cases discussed in the last chapter, in which cases valid conventions were held in open disregard of constitutional provisions relative to the manner of holding conventions, lend weight to the theory that a convention authorized by the constitution stands upon no different footing with respect to the source of its authority, than a convention which is not so authorized, or than one which is even prohibited.

     …If conventions are beyond the jurisdiction of the constitution, it matters not whether the constitution attempts to {61} prohibit or to authorize them, or is silent on the subject; all such conventions are supraconstitutional.

In 1994, Hoar’s analysis was updated by Katherine M. Mauk, in an essay that was as even more uninspiring than Hoar’s deadly prose, but their conclusions remain the same: there is no prohibition against periodic review of the rules and institutions of government by the people, it is only a matter of finding a way to inspire them to undertake the challenge.  On the part of Maryland and New Hampshire (which copied its language from Maryland) it can’t be said that it was for want of inspiring language incorporated into their Declaration of Rights from the outset:

That all persons invested with the legislative or executive powers of government are the trustees of the public, and as such, accountable for their conduct; wherefore whenever the ends of government are perverted, and the public liberty manifestly endangered, and all other means of redress are ineffectual, the people may, and of right ought to do, reform the old, or establish a new government.  The doctrine of non-resistance against arbitrary pwer and oppression is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the  good and happiness of mankind.

At the expense of the U.S. Congress, Professor Francis Newton Thorpe did the best he could to inform the electorate  by compiling and publishing the changes that took place in state constitutions prior to 1909. But given the then poor state of the nation’s archives, and the incomplete manner of recording state laws and constitutional modifications it was inevitably as flawed as it was tedious.  

Thorpe began compiling information on State Constitutions as early as 1888.  The New York Constitution (which probably was the actual source of the text of Maryland’s 20 year rule in 1864) was among the first to garner his attention.  In the margin of his transcription of the forty two page journal of the 1801 New York Constitutional convention Thorpe wrote: “copied in 7 = hrs. continuous. July 26, 1888. F.N.T.”  

Even as careful as he may have tried to be with the sources at his command, Thorpe made countless errors of omission and, at times, transcription.   Between 1776 and 1851 there were sixty-seven amendments to the Maryland Constitution.  Thorpe records only twelve.

Perhaps even as important as the amendments that were passed on by the voters, are the ones that failed. Take for example the proposed Constitution of 1792 of which there is only one known copy.  It attempted to make elections biennial, placed considerably more power in the hands of the indirectly elected senate (including having the governor elected by the electors of the Senate rather than by a joint ballot of the House and Senate), made the governor’s council elected by the Senate Electors, permitted Senators to hold civil office, made the judiciary serve at the pleasure of the General Assembly, easily removable, and, perhaps most importantly of all, added a new clause,

which implied that free blacks had been voting (contrary to Justice Taney’s assertion in the Dred Scott case), and could be elected or appointed to office, something the framers wished to avoid.  We are still researching the debate and the vote over these proposed changes, but in their failure, they illuminate not only the constitutional thinking of the day, but help explain how attitudes towards government and how it ought to function changed in the decades following that first creative burst of constitution writing in 1776.

While the reasons for adopting a mandatory consideration of the sense of the people on calling a constitutional convention prove to be mundane, it is probably not a coincidence that the notion of revisiting the written constitution every generation was a passionately debated topic when Thomas Jefferson first broached it with James Madison.  Indeed it speaks to the heart of Jeffersonian concepts of democracy.

Most scholars are aware of Jefferson’s later pronouncements on the need for periodic constitutional revision. He writes at length about them in his 1816 letter to Samuel Kercheval:

What is generally overlooked is that Jefferson first broached the idea of the importance of rewriting constitutions with James Madison in 1789.  Writing from Paris in the midst of another Revolution not yet consumed by terror, Jefferson was less verbose and more precise in his argument that “the earth always belongs to the living generation.”  I suspect his primary concern was that he was spending far beyond his means as an American in Paris, because he dwells at length on how the debts of the previous generation should not encumber the next, but his philosophical argument based upon Buffon’s life tables was that on average a generation was approximately 20 years, and that every twenty years the constitution should be rewritten.  
… no society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law.  The earth belongs always to the living generation.  They may manage it then, and what proceeds from it, as they please during their usufruct [the concept in Roman Civil Law of the right of using and enjoying all the advantages and profits of the property of another without altering or damaging the substance].  They are masters too of their own persons, and consequently may govern them as they please.   But persons and property make the sum of the objects of government.  The constitutions and the laws of their predecessors extinguished them, in their natural course, with those whose will gave them being.  This could preserve that being till it ceased to be itself, and no longer.  Every constitution then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years.  If it be enforced longer, its an act of force and not of right.
James Madison’s response is equally compelling if not as compassionate.  Madison had just survived an election fight with James Monroe in which he was forced to promise his constituency that if elected he would offer amendments to the newly adopted Federal Constitution designed to protect individual and states’ rights.  Madison replied from New York where the First Congress convened,

Your favor of the 9th. of Jany. inclosing one of Sepr. last did not get to hand till a few days ago. The idea which the latter evolves is a great one, and suggests many interesting reflections to legislators; particularly when contracting and providing for public debts. Whether it can be received in the extent your reasonings give it, is a question which I ought to turn more in my thoughts than I have yet been able to do, before I should be justified in making up a full opinion on it. My first thoughts though coinciding with many of yours, lead me to view the doctrine as not in all respects compatible with the course of human affairs. I will endeavor to sketch the grounds of my skepticism. …
If the observations I have hazarded be not misapplied, it follows that a limitation of the validity of national acts to the computed life of a nation, is in some instances not 
required by Theory, and in others cannot be accomodated to practice. The observations are not meant however to impeach either the utility of the principle in some particular 
cases; or the general importance of it in the eye of the philosophical Legislator. On the contrary it would give me singular pleasure to see it first announced in the proceedings of the U. States, and always kept in their view, as a salutary curb on the living generation from imposing unjust or unnecessary burdens on their successors. But this is a pleasure which I have little hope of enjoying. The spirit of philosophical legislation has never reached some parts of the Union, and is by no means the fashion here, either within or without Congress. The evils suffered & feared from weakness in Government, and licentiousness in the people, have turned the attention more towards the means of strengthening the former, than of narrowing its extent in the minds of the latter. Besides this, it is so much easier to espy the little difficulties immediately incident to every great plan, than to comprehend its general and remote benefits, that our hemisphere must be still more enlightened before many of the sublime truths which are seen thro' the medium of Philosophy, become visible to the naked eye of the ordinary Politician.
The art of constitution making lies not only in the crafting of documents designed to withstand at least a generation of abuse, but also in the passion with which the constitutional issues are debated and resolved peaceably, on paper.

Jefferson and Madison, along with the seventy-eight men who served in the 1776 Constitutional Convention of Maryland, and the hundreds of others who participated in similar conventions in other states, cared passionately about the process and the consequences of writing constitutions.  Their enthusiasm was contagious.  With care and diligence we can recapture most, if not all of that passion, by carefully reconstructing what the framers thought, how they argued, and, most importantly of all, recording precisely what they produced and how their successors amended.  The web provides us with the unparalleled opportunity to accomplish what Francis Newton Thorpe could not, fast, authoritative, well indexed access to the ideas, words, and arguments of those who wrote out constitutions.  The result may well be a revival of the art, a renewal of the passion, for the written explanation of what government is and what government ought to be. Our charge is to marry the technology with the evidence in as cost effective and expeditious a manner as possible.  To that we must turn to the revolution in archives and find the resources to ensure that Justitia is scanned to the highest possible standard of authority and quality.

II
A Revolution in Archives:
WWW.ARCHIVESOFMARYLAND.NET
It isn't very often, if ever, that Archives are thought of as revolutionary, although when our children were young, I did overhear our elder son explaining to a playmate that his father was an anarchist. Yet every once in a while an idea comes along that allows the custodian of the collective memory to contribute something radical, even revolutionary, to the preservation and access of the historical record. In America George Eastman provided the camera and safety film. Religion in the form of the Mormons, and the fear of destruction of vital records, especially during the Second World War, led to the massive capturing of the historical record on a medium that is reasonably permanent, reduces the bulk of the record to be preserved, and is relatively easy to use. Perhaps one of the finest examples of such efforts of benefit to Early American historians, outside of the mountain in Utah, is the often neglected undertaking of William Sumner Jenkins in the Early State Records Project of the Library of Congress.  Summarized in two high acid, now usually crumbling, mimeographed volumes, the Early State Records microfilm is a tour de force. Taking his microfilm camera to every major repository in the United States and its territories, Jenkins filmed in logical categories every printed volume he could find that documented the constitutional and legal history of the states. Contained on his film are sources now lost or which have deteriorated so badly in the fifty years or so since he and his staff filmed them, that the only useable record is that which he provides. Today, most of the master negatives of Jenkins's work are stored at the Library of Congress, where copies can be purchased for a modest fee. I say most, because in the intervening years some of the negatives for the Maryland reels have been lost, as we discovered when we attempted to acquire them for scanning for our own modest attempt at an archival revolution, the Archives of Maryland Online.
When I was working on my doctoral dissertation I had the good fortune, with Dr. Ronald Hoffman, now Director of the Oh  Institute of Early American History and Culture, to be given free access to the stacks of the Maryland Historical Society. There we both worked our way through a vast collection of unorganized archival material relating to Maryland that a former Commissioner of the Land Office had stolen from the basement and stairwells of the State House. We quickly discovered that the Commissioner had not gotten everything, and in fact for every two documents he had taken, one was left behind, ultimately to be carefully catalogued, preserved, and microfilmed in what today at the Maryland State Archives is known as the Rainbow Series of Maryland State Papers.  I vowed then that if I were ever in the position to do something about it, I would save future scholars from having to traipse between Annapolis and Baltimore to use both collections. By a twist of fate (and lack of teaching jobs) I ultimately did reach a point in my career as Archivist where I could do something about it. With the help of William Filby, former director of the Maryland Historical Society, and the threat of replevin of what were obviously public records, I was able to bring the two parts of the collection back together in Annapolis, providing a comprehensive and integrated catalogue, now online, but then on paper, entitled An Inventory of Maryland State Papers (1976). For those who still like hard copy, it is still in print and available from the Maryland State Archives online at www.mdsa.net.
At about the same time we were attempting to bring the public records of Maryland back together and present them in some accessible and useable fashion, the Maryland Historical Society was growing weary of maintaining the inventory of the distinguished Archives of Maryland series. Each year since the late 1880s, the State of Maryland had provided an annual subsidy for the transcription and editing of the earliest records of the state. By 1972 it was thought that almost everything of value had been placed in print and the basement of the Society was crowded with unsold volumes printed on steadily deteriorating high acid paper. It was thought prudent to turn the project back to the state with a modest endowment made up of the residue of the annual subsidy and the modest income from sales.
We jumped at the chance. With the approval of the legislature we invested the money and allowed the interest to accumulate until we had enough to fund another volume, entitled An Historical List of Public Officials of Maryland, 1634-1990 (Annapolis, MD: Maryland State Archives, 1990), which we thought would be the first volume in a new series. At the time we had no idea it would be the last to be traditionally edited and printed. While we waited another four years for the interest to accumulate to the point where we could afford to publish the next, a revolution occurred in information access and sharing that opened a whole new vista for the archival world. In 1994, before all of our colleagues in other State Archives, the National Archives, and the Library of Congress, the Maryland State Archives went online with its website, then with the unwieldy url of www.mdarchives.state.md.us, but now shortened to www.mdsa.net.
Our first objective was to let the world know what treasures our stacks contained. We provided the first comprehensive online guide to holdings while anticipating the American Memory Project with documents online in our Documents for the Classroom series and our Museum Without Walls, still regular features of our site. The results were astounding. From a modest investment of $50,000 to get us up and running, we now maintain several servers for ourselves and a number of state agencies, the firewall for the Annapolis campus of state government, and websites for such agencies as the Governor's office and the State Election Board (which has excellent historical information linked to materials available at the State Archives). Use of the Archives' website (mdsa.net) and the Maryland Electronic Capital (www.mec.state.md.us), which we designed as a portal for state government information, has grown exponentially in the last several years. In FY 1999 these sites handled 6.2 million hits, and during FY 2000 this activity more than doubled to 13.2 million requests. The estimate for FY 2002 is 59 million requests. This response to the resources made available at the Archives is attributable not only to the popularity of the Internet but also to the Archives' continuing efforts to provide greater access to materials online and public response to the resources that are available. To support the work of the Archives, we designed and implemented a site for the Maryland Court system, www.plats.net, which is incorporating scans of all oversized materials filed with the courts (principally mapping of subdivisions and condominiums), saving valuable office space and providing an unparalleled historical mapping resource. To date, www.plats.net provides sufficient income to sustain the archival material in electronic form and a modest income for other collateral archival activities such as the mounting of web-based indexes to land records and the retrospective images of the land records themselves.
Plats.net is the largest undertaking to date in the new Archives of Maryland Online, which as of the first of the year had grown from the modest seventy-two volumes of its first hundred years of existence to 215, some of which encompass access to literally hundreds of thousands of images of original archival material. How we have been able to do so much since 1994, particularly in the two years since we implemented the Archives of Maryland Online, has been due exclusively to the hard work of a very small staff and the miracle of the Internet.
Before I delve more deeply into what we are accomplishing with Archives of Maryland Online and to hint at how much more we could be doing if we could find adequate financing, I should note that not all Archivists share in my enthusiasm for placing archives online. Many of the old school are afraid of losing control over their holdings and even more are rightfully concerned that the medium itself is far from archival. Indeed the electronic record is fragile and, if not maintained in what proves to be a very expensive fail-safe system of redundancy, can be lost or corrupted with blinding speed. Some archivists also expend an extraordinary amount of time attempting to encapsulate, code, and otherwise minutely describe their collections in painfully labor intensive ways, slowing to a crawl the production of finding aids and wasting resources that otherwise could be concentrated on making archives accessible through a simple hypertext markup language approach such as we use. As long as you ensure that that what you present in electronic form is preserved in a secure, well maintained, and verifiable electronic archive (we are about to launch our second terra byte backup server and hope to have funding for a third), and as long as you are willing to use the least expensive existing resources to move images and text of archival material out for the public to use, the risk of loss is roughly equivalent to the threat of fire in any modern archives. As to the elaborate schemes for coding and encapsulating the archival record, they have merit but serve only to make the process of accessing archival material far more expensive than need be at a time when resources for Archives are in greater peril than they have been in decades. At our institution, for example, we are forced to earn nearly one half of what it costs to keep our doors open. It has been out of that one half that most of what we have been able to accomplish on the web has been financed, and, as we become more successful at earning income for essential archival functions, we find the state attempting to take more of what we earn. Just this last year, we were assessed ten percent of our income as "rent" for our building.
In sum, we can't afford to engage in overly elaborate schemes of describing records for the web. As I pointed out thirty years ago in a series of articles for Perspectives, the newsletter of the American Historical Association, archivists and librarians need to make the most of existing resources. Then it meant spending less time on elaborately printed finding aids and more on cheap inventories of collections. Today it means putting as much material on the web in text and image form as possible, as swiftly and as economically as possible, knowing that if placed there within a system that allows ease of improvement and dynamic updating, that which begins at what may not be the best effort, can gradually be improved until it meets the highest standard of editorial and intellectual competence—some of which may even be supplied by the user, if the system is designed properly.
With Archives of Maryland Online our objective is to maintain and expand an intellectually sophisticated and technically elegant site that provides public access to the records that form the constitutional, legal, legislative, and administrative basis of Maryland government. The project provides a state-of-the-art model for delivering a vast quantity of documentary material that is logically organized, easily accessible, and fully searchable. Documents are stored both as OCR or keyboard text and as original images, giving users the ability to verify all text. Editorial enhancements add value to the original documents by providing historical context and links to related materials. Because Archives of Maryland Online is a dynamic repository, enhancements to individual volumes or series of volumes can be made at any time, as new scholarship becomes available or as logically related volumes are added to the site.
Archives of Maryland Online provides immediate access to significant documents for legislative, executive, and judicial staffs; for the citizens of Maryland; and for members of the general public, including scholars and genealogists. This access is not site-dependent; persons living anywhere in the world, who are interested in the documentary history of Maryland, may use this material. Furthermore, they may do so at a level of usage that would do permanent damage to the sources if directed either to the original material or to microfilmed copies, and that would overwhelm the capabilities of the Archives and its staff if all use were restricted to visits to the Hall of Records building or traditional mail inquiries.
Archives of Maryland Online began in Fiscal Year 1999 with a $100,000 grant from the Information Technology Fund. One third of the grant purchased needed equipment and software for scanning images, storing data, and accessing the Internet. The remainder of the funding covered salaries of the project's technical, editorial, and administrative personnel. Additional funding in subsequent budget years has come from general fund appropriations ($55,000 annually) and a small number of private contributions.
The enterprise has three main components. The first is a continuation of the transcription and editing of the series as originally conceived, with paid and volunteer editorial staff producing authoritative electronic volumes of edited archival material. A second component consists of images of all the records encompassed in the Early State Records project for Maryland, continuing each of the categories outlined by William Sumner Jenkins down to the present. Finally, there is an innovated comprehensive website devoted to such themes as plats.net and our new venture, probate.net, which will be devoted to indexing and accessing all wills, inventories, and other Maryland probate records. While not all volumes are currently text searchable, most are and the remainder soon will be, although making any volume searchable is infinitely more time consuming than producing images. Nor do all volumes have the same high level of editorial introductions found in the earlier print volumes. Because the site is dynamic and designed to be constantly improved upon, historical and editorial introductions, including much-needed glossaries, can be added as funds permit and volunteers step forth.
While it is relatively easy to bring modern records online and to convert images to searchable text, the older the records are, the more difficult creating searchable text becomes. One of the most expensive new volumes mounted to date has been Bacon's Laws of Maryland (1765). Providing readable images from the Early State Records microfilm was not difficult, once we had found a microfilm scanner that could do the job well and which we could afford ($70,000 per unit), but because of the condition of the pages and the typography (double fs, etc.), it became evident very quickly that optical character recognition would not work well. Instead we hired a part-time typist to transcribe pages printed off the website which ultimately cost nearly $3,500 in transcription alone. The result was well worth it but underscores that the most economical and efficient approach to putting materials on the web does not necessarily mean "inexpensive."
The seventy-two volumes that comprised the original printed version of the Archives of Maryland were the first to be placed online. They consist of transcriptions of the earliest extant records from the colonial period, largely proceedings of the legislature and executive council but also including some judicial records (both provincial and county), muster rolls from the Revolutionary War, and the correspondence of Governor Horatio Sharpe. Since then we have added images of the Early State Records series, 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 constitutional amendments, 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 can be measured by the volumes on the web site (www.aomol.net), but especially the preface to Volume 380 which was prepared by a valued former employee, Roger Krizer Ball, now of the Library of Congress.
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. 
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. The research team of Karen Hare, Jennifer Hafner and Christine Alvey have no peer.  Their recent investigations into the origins of our State Constitution and the amending process, have added considerable value to our understanding of the process of Constitution making.
Programming for the Archives of Maryland On Line began with the contributions of a high school junior, Daren Brantley, supplemented by Eun-hae Choe, Leslie Mathew, and Jessica Stevens, all under the supervision and management of Greg Lepore, who more than any single person has made Archives of Maryland Online a viable reality. Greg, as Associate Editor, has kept his eye on production and made the best use of available resources, while Lynne MacAdam, as Archives web master, and Jean Russo, Associate Managing Editor, have provided thoughtful perspective and editorial skills of the highest order. Roger H. Kizer Ball has helped manage and train an enthusiastic part-time staff, while offsite staff like Kristen Smith Hair have rendered eighteenth-century printing into searchable text. Without Chris Allan's budgetary skills and willingness to convert all our requests for funding into bureaucratically acceptable argument, and without his designing the networking and electronic archives of which Archives of Maryland Online is an integral part, however, none of what we have accomplished to date would have been possible.
Some thirty years ago, out of the prolonged lunchtime discussions led by Dr. Lois Green Carr, came a revolution in the interpretation of early American society. Known as the Maryland Hall of Records Mafia, Lois, Lorena Walsh, and Russ Menard, and their many disciples transformed the study of American colonial society by effective and exhaustive use of such primary sources as Maryland probate records. Hopefully, out of what I have been brazen enough to call the Maryland Archival Revolution will come a new appreciation of the vastness and diversity of historical records made accessible through the Maryland State Archives website (mdsa.net) and its premier effort at bringing the text of archival material to as wide an audience as possible, archivesofmaryland.net.  If we are successful in placing a scanned Justitia into a truly manageable and easily retrievable environment, we will have gone a long ways towards salvaging the nearly lost art of Constitution making.  It even may be that by revealing as much as we can about how constitutions were written and about the lives of those who wrote them, that we will come to want to call a convention to review and improve upon their efforts at least every twenty years.

Thank you,