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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 |
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