ARCHIVIST OF THE HALL OF RECORDS 35

	Liber 22 1738 ................................................................	........ 548
	Liber 23 1743-1744 ........................................................	........ 712
	Liber 33 1764-1765 ........................................................	........ 460
		Total 32,348

PHOTOCOPYING

It is with a deep sense of relief that I can report the end of our
project for photostating all the county land records from the erection of
the several counties to the date of the adoption of the Federal Constitution
by the Maryland Convention, April 28, 1788. We have gained for the
Hall of Records a full set of the originals, which have been repaired and
rebound where necessary and which constitute an invaluable addition to
our collection of historical records. The counties have newly-made and
bound photostatic copies, and we have therefore insured ourselves against
further loss of records for the early years. The period covered is, of course, a
valuable one for genealogical studies, and the duplication was especially
important because the terminal date of our project was roughly the same
date as the beginning of the abstract system which has provided usable,
if not perfect, copies for the later period. The project cost a great deal
in time — all the spare time of the camera operator for close to ten years —
and a great deal of money as well. When we began we had thought that
we might extend the scope of the project to the beginning of the next
century or even later, but in the meanwhile the use of microfilm has be-
come universal and any further copying of land records or any county
records will be done on film. We had also considered the possibility of
duplicating the Will records by photostat and we tried it in one county,
Somerset. We are now finishing that series, and we believe we have done
enough to decide that we should go no further.

The continuous-process camera which we had ordered the year before
was only delivered and installed at the very end of fiscal year 1952. Even
then we were not able to use it until the new fiscal year began because of
the need to change our water heating system in order to provide a sufficient
flow of warm water to the washing apparatus of the new machine. The
camera is at this writing in constant use.

Only a small part of our microfilm equipment is required to satisfy
the needs of our clients, both public and private. For the rest, it is used to
add miscellaneous items of interest to our collections of manuscripts or