50 TWENTY-SEVENTH ANNUAL REPORT

effort to provide maximum assistance before the move to new quarters.
Sixteen schedules, governing 92 record series, were issued, resulting in
the destruction of 207 cubic feet of unneeded records. These schedules,
together with the 45 established for agencies of Montgomery, Balti-
more, Cecil and Worcester Counties, brought 458 additional record
series under the control of records schedules.

The application of the schedules established during the year and
of those issued in previous years resulted in the release of 9,479 cubic
feet of filing and storage space in the offices of State, County and
municipal agencies. As in the past, we have continued to dispose of
records authorized for destruction to various waste-paper companies
on a contractual basis. This year the State derived $2,642.62 from this
source, approximately the same amount as received last year. Of this
sum, $1,726.16 was returned to the general funds of the State. The
remainder went to the Department of Employment Security, which
operates entirely on federal funds.

We again continued our efforts to reduce the quantity of non-
current records retained in the offices of State agencies, in order to
reduce the cost of maintaining these records and to establish more
effective control over them. In the course of the year, 3,076 cubic feet
of records were transferred to the Annapolis Record Center or the
Baltimore Record Center. With the increased volume of records housed
in the Centers, additional time was required to service them properly.
The service performed by our Center personnel includes shelving the
records, maintaining the necessary control forms, providing reference
to the records, microfilming records to be preserved only on film, and
supervising the destruction of records. Some indication of the quality
of the services furnished and the greater use made of them by State
agencies may be found in the additional number of requests for record
units or information from records, which were handled by the Centers.
These requests increased from 1,163 in 1961 to 2,201 in 1962, a trend
which is expected to continue as the holdings of these depositories
increase.

The microfilm service provided to State agencies in the two Record
Centers remains an integral part of our records program. Microfilming
is usually employed only when the original would otherwise be retained
indefinitely or when a security copy is considered necessary. This year
1,391,611 images were exposed for State agencies. Among these were