6 TWENTY-EIGHTH ANNUAL REPORT

meant by supervision? The law was in conflict with many rules of
court, with many local laws, with the emotions and prejudices of
officers and laymen alike in the counties.

In any case it soon became obvious that we were not equipped
spiritually to take care of portraits, our shelves were not built for
newspapers, we had no place for a library of printed books, nor did
we have space for sharks' teeth, pieces of the Peggy Stewart, arrow
heads and many other museum items not mentioned in the statute.

But we could pretty much fix our own policy except where others'
rights or prerogatives were involved. This had to be determined to
begin our work, and it was, in time, by clarifying laws, by opinions of
the Attorney General to clarify the clarifying laws, by persuasion, by
use of photocopying machines of various types and by just getting
people used to an idea.

But the original Act was strongly biased in favor of historical
records. No other reason for collecting records in one place was
thought of at the time. Soon, however, the war in Europe made us
think of duplicate copies, security copies, and we began the program
of microfilming which has continued until this day. Still we were think-
ing of preserving the historical records, the thought of duplicating
records so that there would be some to permit government to function
after a disaster came long after that, at the beginning of the atomic
era. And this step brought us by the back door into records manage-
ment.

We had in the early forties begun to give officers of government
authorization to destroy records. We had come full circle; created to
preserve records we were now the agency and the only one in the
state which could destroy them. What a change a decade had made!

By now we had eliminated certain non-archival functions included
in the law. We had taken on some others: archival as for example be-
coming custodians of the records of all offices which became defunct,
quasi-archival such as the building of a fine documents collection, and
non-archival such as the editing and distributing of the MARYLAND
MANUAL. In addition the members of our staff have assigned to them
certain duties as individuals such as participation in the Maryland
Historical Trust and the New York World's Fair.

But the addition which has been most important has been Records