Reappraisal

Dr. Loren Schweninger 

 It was an eventful time at the Maryland State Archives these past two weeks. Although I gave my final Queen Anne’s County presentation over a week ago, I can still feel its effects on my daily work. My typical day revolves around researching slave freedom petitions from the Dr. Loren Schweninger Collection—a topic I have talked about at length in this blog—but lately I have been through ongoing communication with the Maryland State Archivist, Dr. Ed Papenfuse. His interest in these presentations on the Eastern Shore bumped up the priority of the Schweninger collection reappraisal.

When Dr. Papenfuse, commonly called “Ed” in the context of archivists and historians in Maryland, learned I was utilizing the Schweninger Collection for meaty historical research during my nine month fellowship he also asked me to examine the collection for gaps. Recap—Dr. Loren Schweninger is a historian and associate of Ed. His eponymous collection, or at least the digital proxy that I’m examining, are digitized scans of microfilm created in the mid-1990s. The microfilm followed a citation list based on research Dr. Schweninger and others performed on-site. They span thirty-five agencies of state and county government from the War of Independence to the eve of Civil War. Although some are scribed on official-looking, uniform sheaths of cloth-like paper, many are loose, irregular, and include affixed newspaper clippings announcing slave or estate sales. Oftentimes these records duplicate content in clerk produced copies like photocopies or e-mail attachments today; I expect these ultra official records were not examined as closely by Schweninger because the manner with which the court tried petitions favored record creation and filing in the unbound papers rather than those materials destined for the big books.

The collection exists in three forms in order of increasing accessibility: As an abstract collective of citations while the records span dozens of shelves, stacks, and up to four floors. As a collection of microfilm. As a digitized collection on MSA servers that can be reached via a simple HTML finding aid written by Ed. He clearly valued the collection because, as I recently learned, he did the coding himself on his own time. The finding aid, which is one of three intellectual access points, is arranged alphabetically by agency and provides links to the opening pages of the digitized film the records inhabit. The remaining two access points are Collection and Microfilm inventories, which provide intellectual access and microfilm navigation respectively. Collection inventory breaks the film down intellectually and groups the content by agency regardless of its film reel, much like Ed’s finding aid, although my early efforts to sort through the collection proved the finding aid’s content was based on the Microfilm inventory.

Following my research work on William McNeir, a special Research Department project, and the bustle of public presentations, I returned to Schweninger. After several e-mails and a meeting with Ed I devised a method to perform my task. I drafted and shared an online spreadsheet tracking my reappraisal of Schweninger to verify its completeness and provide URLs for the start and end points of each case. Each reel begins with target sheets declaring the forthcoming slide contents and individual target cards declaring the catalog number, agency, description, and other metadata particular to that petition or case. Currently the only way to view a particular case is to click a link for the entire film and scroll through perhaps hundreds of images until you reach your desired target card.

Now, halfway through the reels, I can safely say the vast majority of the collection is as it should be. Although rare, the most common annoyance is a missing or errant target card separating each case; the necessary examination of the combined or mislabeled cases is a necessary kink in my workflow because it prevents my slipping into a “scan, ctrl-c, ctrl-v” stupor. Only two cases out of several hundred are missing. A clerical error on the Microfilm inventory in the Special Collections catalog describes a petition that does not exist on the scans and shares an identical classification number with a case that does exist. This error is repeated on the finding aid but not the Collection inventory catalog. Once I complete my survey and retrieve the truant records I can fix this problem and many others.

Alex Champion--Maryland State Archives