50 TWENTY-FlRST ANNUAL REPORT

we plan to operate in the new State Office Buildings in Annapolis and Balti-
more, the savings effected will be appreciably greater.

The control of the records of all State agencies by schedule has continued
to receive our attention for two reasons: first, so that records which should
be preserved may be identified and secured against loss; and second, so that
records of temporary value may be destroyed as soon as they are no longer
needed. The proper selection of current records for preservation or disposal is
never an easy task, and in an agency such as the Department of Health it is
particularly difficult to determine which of hundreds of cubic feet of records
will be needed in the future. With the cooperation of the professional staff of
the Department, however, schedules were established for the records in this
agency and the hospitals for chronic diseases, and surveys were made of the
records of the local departments and the tuberculosis hospitals. These sche-
dules, together with those completed for other State agencies, increased the
number of record series controlled by schedule from 658 to 1,116. This aspect
of our work has been completed in sixty-two agencies and is well advanced in
sixteen others. There is much work that remains to be done, however, before
the totality of State records is controlled by schedule.

Encouraging progress was also made in bringing under the control of re-
tention and disposal schedules the records of county agencies. There is a basic
difference between the State and local records programs. The local program is
voluntary, with emphasis upon educating local officials to manage their records
properly. For the first time we achieved a staff stability in this field which
made it possible to pursue this work without interruption. As a result, we were
able to push toward completion the task of establishing schedules for the re-
cords subject to disposition in the office of the Clerks of Court and Registers
of Wills in the several counties. Some attention was also given to the control of
the records of other county agencies, and advice and assistance were provided
the town of Kensington and the city of Cumberland in their efforts to dispose
of unneeded records. In the course of the year, thirty-six schedules containing
196 record series were established.

As a direct result of the disposal schedules issued in previous years and
those established during fiscal year 1956, a total of 9,508 cubic feet of storage
and filing space was released in the offices of the several State and county agen-
cies during the past fiscal year. This represents the space occupied by 1,584
letter-size filing cabinets. As in the past, we have continued to dispose of the
unneeded records to various waste paper companies on a contractual basis.
This year the State realized $2,848.68 from the sale of waste paper, of which
$1,830.54 was returned to the General Funds of the State.