About
Maryland Digital Cultural Heritage (MDCH) is a collaborative, statewide digitization program headquartered at the Enoch Pratt Free Library/State Library Resource Center in Baltimore. Our program partners with Maryland libraries, archives, historical societies, museums, and other institutions to digitize and provide free online access to materials relating to the state's history and culture. Since the program began in 2002, MDCH's collections have grown to include over 5,000 items, such as maps, manuscripts, photographs, artwork, books, and other media.
Tips for using our digital collections:
- You can search across all digital collections from the MDCH homepage and the main Collections page.
- The Advanced Search pane enables you to search within specific fields, to combine terms or search by a phrase, and to search by date.
- If you have selected a specific digital collection from the list that appears on the main Collections page (e.g., Edgar Allan Poe Collection), any search terms you enter will automatically search only that collection. You can add other collections to your search by using the checkboxes provided on the left side of the screen or clicking on Advanced Search.
- Collections and search results are set to display in a grid view, which includes thumbnails and basic information about each item (Title, Subject, Description, Collection). Just above the Thumbnail column are options for changing your viewing preferences. You can click on Display Options to switch to a thumbnail view, which includes larger thumbnails and only the Title field information. You can also select the number of items to display and sort them by Title, Subject, or Description.
- When viewing an individual item, the complete information for that item will appear under the heading Object Description.
- For items with multiple pages or images, such as letters, you must click on the image thumbnail on the right side of the screen to view each image. Page level information, such as transcripts (if available), will appear at the bottom of the screen under the heading Description.
- All highlighted terms within the object/item and page descriptions are linked. Clicking on the link will automatically search across all MDCH collections for that term. For example, if the Subject field for an item contains the term Maryland--History--Civil War, 1861-1865, clicking on that term will locate other items in the collections with the same subject term.
- Further instructions regarding searching tips and techniques can be found by clicking on Help. The Help link appears at the top right of the screen only when you are at the main Collections page or searching within collections.