ARCHIVIST OF THE HALL OF RECORDS 41

special section of the Manual devoted to current publications, the list need
not be repeated here. All of these documents were sent to us by the publish-
ing agencies under the provisions of Chapter 651, Acts of 1947. We have
been fortunate in receiving perfect cooperation in this project from its
inception.

Through the courtesy of Mr. Clifton A. Phipps of Greencastle,
Pennsylvania, we were permitted to photocopy his Report of the Chief
Engineer of the Cumberland Valley Rail Road Company, which appeared
originally as Document "A" of the Public Documents of 133 5, an extremely
rare volume. We were able to purchase, at a very reasonable price, from
Mr. Claude W. Dorsey of Laurel, Maryland, seven reports published during
the period 1839-1850 consisting of five Reports of the State Treasurer,
a Report of the Maryland Penitentiary and a Report on the Mason and Dixon
Line. We also microfilmed, through the courtesy of the State Law Librarian,
the Index to the Public Documents from 1834 to 1844, an extremely useful
and rare document.

We are hopeful that better progress will be made in fiscal year 1954.
Unfortunately, many agencies which have collected documents are not able
to help us because their collections have not been processed enough to
determine the existence of duplicates. It is possible that we shall have to
microfilm many missing items from the collection of the Library of Congress,
but since this is an expensive method, we shall first exhaust every other
possibility.

ACCESSIONS

For many years our major efforts have been directed toward bringing in
the earliest records of the State. In 1945, the transfer to the Hall of Records
of all records in the county courthouses made prior to April 28, 1788, was
made mandatory. As nearly all such records are now in our custody, we
have begun to concern ourselves with records of more recent date.

By way of an experiment, we transferred all remaining volume records
of the Register of Wills of Talbot County dating before 1850 to the Hall of
Records and replaced them with microfilm copies. This arrangement places
the original records in our stacks where they can be better protected and
serviced, without depriving the residents of the county of the information