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Location Closure The Light Street Branch will be opening at noon on Tuesday, March 19 and Wednesday, March 20 due to facilities maintenance.

Location Closure The Forest Park Branch is closed for renovations. The Washington Village Branch is closed for facility maintenance. The Walbrook Branch is closed for HVAC repairs.

Maryland Department

The Maryland Department is a great first stop for researching any topic that is related to Maryland or the people, places and events that have occurred in the state. Since 1934 the Maryland Department staff has been collecting and organizing books and other types of material on every subject as long as the information is about Maryland.


Maryland Department

The Collection

The Maryland Department collection is made up of more than 55,000 volumes. Topics include genealogical research, local history research, and legal assistance and research. Unique materials in the collection include Maryland Yearbooks from secondary schools and colleges across the state, an ephemera collection with over 6,000 items, including political campaign literature, theater programs, postcards, annual reports, and menus, Maryland city and telephone directories, and Maryland state documents as a depository of the State Publications Depository & Distribution Program.

Other collections include Maryland map/atlas collection, city directories and reverse telephone directories for many counties, Maryland fiction collection, photo collection with over 24,000 black-and-white images, primarily from the 1930s, and a telephone directories from across the state dating back to the early 1920s. Research resources include biography card files that contain more than 300 drawers of entries, and vertical files (clipping files) with over 300,000 items on more than 7,000 subjects.

Maryland Yearbooks

The Maryland Department house a large collection of Maryland Yearbooks. If you have any yearbooks from a Maryland college or secondary school that you would like to donate, call us at (410) 396-5468 or send an e-mail to mdx@prattlibrary.org.

Learn more about the collection and listen to a podcast about the Maryland Yearbook collection, or browse a PDF list of current yearbooks available in the Maryland Department.

Maryland Dept yearbooks - University of Maryland Terrapin

Yearbooks like the University of Maryland Terrapin are one of many from Baltimore and around the state.

The Sun Index bound volumes from 1922, 1923

Deaths, Editorials, Sports, Stories: The Sun Index bound volumes from 1922-23.

Allegany County phone directories in the Maryland Department

Allegany County phone directories from the past.

searching index cards by subject in the Maryland Department

Vintage index cards with newspaper clippings of Maryland subjects are available to browse.

Genealogy Research Guide
More Information
Genealogy and family history research - old family photographs and leaves

Genealogy Research Guide


Research your family history and genealogy with extensive resources, both in person and online.

Government Documents
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Government Documents labels - Federal Register 1972

Government Documents


The Central Library manages the State Publications Depository and Distribution Program, including documents from all State agencies.