Project:

ARCHIVES OF MARYLAND
(Documents for the Classroom)
Searching for Ancestors who were Slaves: An Index to the Freedom Records of Prince George's County Maryland, 1808-1869, by Louise Joyner Hienton,
designed, scanned and edited by Dr. Edward C. Papenfuse and the Summer 2000 Maryland State Archives Internship Program.
MSA GOVPUB 65
 
 

Project Managers:

Ed Papenfuse/Chris Haley
 
 

Overview and Goals:

The purpose of this project is to aid in the search for the ancestors of descendants of slaves while at the same time preserving existing indexes and making them net-ready in compliance with SB 197.  This is a project that should be of great interest to the new Slavery Commission and should ultimately be paid for out of appropriations for the work of the Commission.

There are three distinct goals of the project:

1) to scan accurately and with as much contrast as possible all of the ca. 13,000 cards in MSA S 1411, known as Index 38 into a Paperport platform using Visioneer or better scanners, or directly into Omnipage

2) to export the images of the cards via Paperport or Omnipage, and convert them to readable ascii text using Scansoft's Omnipage software

3) to convert the text and images to searchable htmls as a Maryland State Archives publication in the Archives of Maryland, Government Publications series (known familiarly as Documents for the Classroom), using a process similar to that used with the Archives of Maryland series. Lynne please note:  the Documents for the Classroom series will now consist of two parts, one managed through speccol (MSA SC 2221) and the other through govpub.  The former will be used for multi- document/ multi- thread document packets.  The latter will be used primarily for single source or single index publications.

4) to link edited htmls with images of the original documents referred to in the index and other related materials, either all programmatically, or partially, employing global search and replace techniques of logically consistent text.
 

Step by Step procedures

Instructions for scanning with Paperport
 
 

Hardware and software requirements:

1) Pentium class or better PC workstation in the Searchroom classroom with

• as reliable and as large sized (preferably over 20 gigs) gigabyte hard drive as possible and at minimum 128 megs of memory
• fast, reliable video card
• at minimum a 17 inch monitor, preferably flat.  The larger the better.
• good Visioneer strobe scanner
• the usual network card and connections

• Paperport 6.1 or better software
• FUNDUC Search and Replace software
• Omnipage 10.0 or better ocr software
• Quick File Rename freeware
• Perl programs adapted from the Archives of Maryland project