MSA Special Collections; Beyond the Basics

Featuring guest speaker Maria Day

Maryland State Archives Department of Special Collections preserves the State’s holdings of private documents and culturally-significant records. The department maintains over 6200 individual collections that have wide diversity in format, size, and information. Personal papers contain family secrets within fragile diaries and manuscript letters. Illustrated–and sometimes hand-drawn–maps tell stories about the growth of population and industrialization of our state. Governors and public officials have left documents that reveal their character and family life. Other collections are preserved in now-historic technologies: from LP records to audio CDs; daguerreotypes to inkjet prints; floppy disks to “born-digital” files.

Maria Day serves as Director of Special Collections and Conservation at Maryland State Archives, where she has worked since 2008. She earned an Associates degree at Antonelli College in commercial photography before transferring to Indiana University, Bloomington, where she received a BA degree cum laude in Art History in 1992. Her professional experience includes teaching art history to high school and college students and serving six years as a museum educator for Historic Annapolis. Ms Day’s specializations as a scholar include British and American art history and design from 1850-1950, as well as works of art on paper. She wrote about the 1939-1940 New York World’s Fair for her Master’s thesis at the University of Maryland College Park. Ms. Day has presented at regional archives and history conferences, and especially enjoys giving public talks about Maryland State Archives holdings that put the agency’s collections into broader cultural contexts. In addition to her supervision of Special Collections, she was appointed head of conservation in 2017 and charged with managing collections care for materials in all formats throughout the agency.