Special Collections and University Archives

The University of Maryland’s 1856 Project, part of the Universities Studying Slavery consortium, has been awarded a generous $200,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation Public Knowledge program to establish a two-year research incubator program that will investigate the legacy of slavery at the university and document histories of enslaved individuals, ensuring their stories and contributions are recognized, honored and preserved.

The University of Maryland Libraries’ Special Collections in Mass Media & Culture (MMC) is proud to announce the addition of the papers of the late journalist Ann Corrick to its growing collection of material on women in broadcasting. Ann Corrick, whose voice is one of the only female correspondents in the Group W (Westinghouse) tape archives, led a remarkable career in the mid-20th century when women were rarely permitted to participate in the male-dominated fields of broadcasting and journalism.

The University of Maryland (UMD) Libraries was awarded a $322,532 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to support an ongoing collaborative effort to digitize historic Maryland newspapers published before 1964.

As a part of the year-long programing surrounding our new exhibit, “Rising Up: 100 Years of Student Activism for Justice and Civil Rights at the University of Maryland,” UMD Libraries is excited to invite you to Creating Liberating Spaces: Activists, Archivists, Librarians and Social Justice, a Talk with Mariame Kaba, on November 2, 2023 from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. Due to limited seating, registration is required. Learn more and register.

UMD Libraries is excited to announce the “Rising Up: 100 Years of Student Activism for Justice and Civil Rights at the University of Maryland” exhibition in Hornbake Library. To celebrate, join us on Wednesday, October 25, from 4:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. for an opening reception. Meet the exhibition’s curators, hear from speakers who will share experiences about their struggle for civil rights and social justice, and take a guided tour of the exhibit.

The University of Maryland Libraries announces the debut of a significant, newly digitized collection, making available online for the first time tens of thousands of records documenting the intersection of the labor and civil rights movements in the United States. Featuring materials from the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organization (AFL-CIO)’s National Office and Southeast Division, these records are held respectively by the University of Maryland (UMD) and Georgia State University (GSU).

A group of undergraduate students have created a limited podcast series using archives from the Hornbake Library. The series, With Love & Struggle—researched and written by Janete Amaya, Hannah Bray, Maliyah Daniels, Ashley Mazur, Katherine Guerrero Rivera, Viviane Stackhouse, and Fibee Ybanez—dives into the Libraries’ archival collection of Off Our Backs, an underground feminist magazine that ran from 1970 to 2008.

The University of Maryland Libraries is excited to announce the acquisition of Ford’s Theatre records. The Ford’s Theatre records will be archived with Special Collections in Performing Arts (SCPA) and located in the Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library.

The UMD Libraries is pleased to announce that Lae’l Hughes-Watkins has been named the inaugural Associate Director for Engagement, Inclusion, and Reparative Archiving in Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA). Hughes-Watkins assumes this new leadership role after serving for over three years as University Archivist. (A search to fill the now-vacant archivist role will be conducted soon.)

The archives of Mass Media & Culture (MMC) in Special Collections and University Archives is pleased to announce that 17 episodes of the groundbreaking program PowerPoint are now available for streaming in UMD Libraries Digital Collections.