LETTER OF TRANSMITTAL

February 3, 1953
To THE HONORABLE

THE HALL OF RECORDS COMMISSION

ANNAPOLIS, MARYLAND
Gentlemen:

In the following pages you will find a detailed report — perhaps too
detailed — of all the work accomplished at the Hall of Records during
the fiscal year of 1952. Many of our functions are traditional and are
well-known to you because they have appeared in every report of the Archi-
vist. Most of these traditional functions involve an end product which
may be measured — so many documents circulated, so many pages lamina-
ted, so many photostatic or microfilm copies provided, and so forth. For
some years now it has been a pleasure to report about these things to you,
for almost invariably, where our effort alone was involved, I have been
able to show that we have accomplished more each year than ever before.
This year is no exception, as the comparative figures which I have given
for each department will prove.

Certain of our activities do not lend themselves however to quanti-
tative reporting of this kind. And, by coincidence, these are functions
which we have assumed recently. I thought it would perhaps be worth-
while at this time to give some account of how we happen to find our-
selves involved in so many tasks which are traditionally non-archival. We
assumed the editorship of the Maryland Manual in 1948 at the request of
Governor Lane and with the approval of the Hall of Records Commission.
In 1952, the Commission at the suggestion of Governor McKeldin, decided
to continue this work. Even a cursory examination of the Manual will
reveal how exacting and time consuming such a volume must be.

The Public Documents Project began in 1947 as the result of an Act
of Assembly of that year (Chapter 651) which established the Hall of
Records as a depository for all publications of the State government. It
was our own idea to build up a file of earlier publications, especially re-
ports, of existing agencies in order to make this collection more useful,
and secondly to collect the publications of agencies now defunct so that
students, legislators, and others might find the history of a governmental
function as readily available as that of an agency. We could not have