Index access to Civil Cases, Baltimore City Circuit Court, 1989-1994. A request from a judge to review the judge's unrecorded opinions found among the case files of the civil division of Baltimore City Circuit Court, allowed the Archives to focus on the problems of providing reasonable index access to several thousand cubic feet of civil court permanent records now in the custody of the Maryland State Archives. Although defined as permanent records by a legally binding records retention and disposal schedule as well as by court rule, the index compiled by the clerk's office (from earliest times known as a 'docket') had not been transferred to the Archives. In searching for the dockets it was discovered that a mainframe computer docketing procedure had been implemented in the 1980s and that in 1998 the mainframe data accumulated up to that point had been moved off of the main frame into a new case management system programmed and managed through a 'Progress' database. In doing so, all word searching through the dockets was lost except for a limited number of fields (litigants and lawyers, for example) and by specialized query routines that only Progress programmers with access rights to the database could execute. Today there is limited search capability on line (Case Search) of a limited number of fields, but not of any of the other data in the dockets, including whether or not a written opinion was filed in a case and, if so, by whom. With the skilled programming assistance of the former head of the Civil Division of the Baltimore City Circuit Court who now works for the JIS division of the Administrative Office of the Courts, a text dump by year of all data in the dockets for the court from 1989-1994 was provided the Archives. A search was then conducted for all cases that noted the involvement of a particular judge and for the coding/abbreviations used by the clerk to denote that an order/opinion was filed in the case. Those cases were then pulled from the boxes by their case number, scanned, and made available here as a sample.
This important exercise in appraisal and access to permanent court records has made it clear that when permanent case files are transferred to Archives custody, they must be accompanied by any docketing/index information that has been recorded by the Court, along with an explanation of any coding/abbreviations/acronymns/shorthand used to designate the process in the case and the nature of its resolution. In doing so the shortcomings of the recording process need also to be explained/noted. For example, the judge's name in this sample was at times misspelled, so variants in spelling needed to be searched. It is also clear that the clerk did not always consistently record the coding that there was a written opinion or order in the case, making it necessary to pull a number of cases that proved not to have opinions.
It is also important to point out that the transfer of docket information from the mainframe to Progress databases in 1998 may not have included all the data on the mainframe. Cases have been found in the boxes transferred for which there are no docket entries in the Progress database and in the on line Case Search. In addition, not all cases included in the database were transferred, although in both instances, the numbers of omissions appear to be small in comparison to the total number of cases.
The cases pulled and scanned for this appraisal sample are hyperlinked in http://msa.maryland.gov/megafile/msa/speccol/sc5300/sc5339/000241/000000/000001/unrestricted/bccc_dockets_1989_1994.html
