The Archivists' Bulldog
Newsletter of
The Maryland State Archives
August 23, 1999
Vol. 13, No. 16
www.mdsa.net

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The Archivists' Bulldog
INQUIRING MINDS WANT TO KNOW: MARYLAND LEGAL HISTORY ON-LINE 
by Roger H. Kizer Ball, Daren Brantley, Jin Claggett, and Kim Collins 

Did your great-great-great-great grandfather fight in the American Revolution? Well, just ask Kim Collins. After spending almost as much time working on Volume 18 of the Archives of Maryland as it took the revolutionaries to win independence from tyranny, she is intimately familiar with the muster rolls of the war. Thanks to her effort, researchers will have that information available at their fingertips. The interns of the Maryland Legal History On-line Project - Daren Brantley, Jin Claggett, Kim Collins, and Roger H. Kizer Ball - have devoted ten weeks of their summer to make the Archives of Maryland accessible to the public via the Archives web site. 

Did you ever lie awake at night plagued by the question of exactly how big is a hogshead of tobacco? Well, let's put an end to your restless nights. In the future you will no longer have to drive all the way to the Maryland State Archives in Annapolis and risk your life trying to navigate the ever dangerous Route 50 to  look up the answers you seek. Just hop out of bed and turn on your computer to rest your troubled mind. 

Through a grant from the Information Technology Fund of the State of Maryland, the project seeks to put primary documents concerning Maryland legal history on-line in a word searchable format. We have tirelessly scanned every page of all 72 volumes of the Archives of Maryland series - and that is a lot of pages! In addition, the scanning encompasses a new Volume 73, Kilty's Landholder's Assistant and Land Office Guide, and Volume 74, the Proceedings of the 1867 Constitutional Convention. 

An additional component of the project involves putting the scanned pages through an optical character recognition (OCR) program that will allow researchers  to search the volumes by keyword. Volumes 1-34 and 68-74 have been completed, with the rest to be finished  in the future. The search engine is the creation of our high school intern, Daren Brantley. He also wrote the software that converts the volumes to a web ready format. 

For the present, researchers wanting access to materials available from the Maryland Legal History Project should contact Greg Lepore at 


The Archivists' Bulldog 
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MULTIMEDIA RESOURCES 
by Lee Watkins 

Are you interested in using video or internet multimedia creatively? Then this work is for you! This summer I worked with Chris Haley on oral history projects consisting of video documentary and archival documents, culminating in a new living history initiative to document Maryland's treasures. Most of the work centered around the capture and digitization of video as well as transparencies and special collections items. Subjects included the Duvall-DuVal Papers (MSA SC 625) which is a collection of materials relating mainly to Gabriel Duvall (1752-1844) whose public service spanned nearly 60 years, genealogy workshop videos, and interview with Phebe Jacobson. Many of the videos required extensive editing in Adobe Premiere, as well as a compression scheme using Real Media software. 

I scanned several documents from the Duvall-DuVal Papers and then saved them as TIFF files. Later Chris and I taped Phebe in a interview where she described the importance of these records. The same method was used for the beginning genealogy web page (to be made available in the near future), where real media videos are broken down to answer simple questions. It is very important to make the web pages as simple and informative as possible, thus minimizing the need for feedback questions.

Capturing video to digital form posed significant problems due to the immense amount of storage required in raw form. For example, a fifteen minute segment of workshop footage will take up over one and a half gigabytes of space. With each workshop lasting six hours space consumption becomes problem. A three tape workshop, once digitized, would take up nearly 70 CDs, and that's for a screen the size of a matchbox. Luckily, clips can be greatly compressed once they have been edited, although a significant loss in quality does result. I compared various audio and video compression formats (called codecs) which can be used to make the digital media more manageable. Most gave similar results, differing only in their approach. The Real media (RM) codec proved different, however. The video was fuzzy, and the audio was muffled, but it was worth it! File sizes fell to under two megabytes, and clips played as they downloaded, rather than after. Without RM, nobody would have the patience to watch these videos. 

TECHNOLOGY AT THE ARCHIVES
by Daren Brantley 

Not quite knowing what to expect in the coming weeks, I entered my summer internship as a member of the Maryland Legal History group. Upon learning about the electronic publishing goals of the project, I realized that this was an area where my experience in computing could be put to good use. When not scanning, I wrote a Perl script to automate the conversion of OCR text output into html, linking the text and images produced by our team.

Outside of this work I built and tuned a pair of Linux/Apache web servers. These servers automatically index the internal and external web sites of the Archives every other night using 
ht://Dig, making the contents of these sites searchable.  I am ending my internship with an investigation of  future directions in electronic publishing, particularly the potential of XML as a document format for projects like Maryland Legal History Online. 


CONSERVATION INTERNSHIP 
by Melissa Kramer 

Since July 5, I have had the opportunity to work in the conservation lab for two days a week. Throughout this time, I have been
working on several Baltimore City plats dating from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Through this work, I have learned many techniques for conserving  paper. These include dry surface removal of soil, removal of old repairs, wet cleaning of residues left from these repairs, mending tears and creating inserts with Japanese tissue and wheat starch paste, lining an entire document with Japanese tissue, and relaxing and flattening documents. It was very interesting to work with these plats 

because each is unique and requires different treatment from the next. Some have color washes and most have detailed ink drawings and calligraphy. Some documents are very creased and brittle with many tears, while others just need cleaning and small mends. 

I have also recently begun to learn about repairing damaged books for use in libraries. While working in the lab I have had the benefit of being exposed to the many different projects that conservators work on daily.  I have learned  so much just from listening to and watching how a conservator approaches various problems.  I greatly appreciate the opportunity to have begun learning what paper conservation entails through hands-on experience.