Special Collections and University Archives

UMD Libraries’ Special Collections and University Archives are pleased to announce 2025 recipients two research awards aimed at supporting research in Hornbake Library - the 20th Century Japan Research Awards and Katherine Anne Porter Research Award.

The University of Maryland Libraries are excited to announce the acquisition of two 19th-century iron Washington hand presses donated to Special Collections and University Archives by Christopher and Patricia Manson of Rockville, MD and Ellie Denker of Potomac, MD. These gifts will be the foundation for a new letterpress printing studio on the ground floor of Hornbake Library, set to open in 2025.

Project STAND, a national grassroots archival consortium foster ethical documentation of contemporary and past social justice movements in underdocumented student populations, has received a $1.5 million grant from the Mellon Foundation.

A collection of works by notable American graphic artist J. J. Lankes (1884–1960) has been donated to the University of Maryland Libraries’ Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA) by alum and Lankes scholar Welford D. Taylor Ph.D. ‘66, and his wife, Carole W. Taylor. The collection comprises over 600 woodcut prints, dozens of books, and myriad periodicals illustrated by Lankes, as well as correspondences and books from Lankes’s personal library.

Marcus Ortiz and Alona Norwood, the two inaugural Fisher Family Library Faculty Fellows for Inclusive Excellence, arrived at UMD Libraries this fall to get started on their two-year appointments, and they have hit the ground running.

A new program established by the University of Maryland Libraries, Truth, Reconciliation, and Understanding in the University Archives (TRU-UA), will facilitate an in-depth exploration of critical issues associated with the histories and information included in the University Archives. This campus-wide educational and outreach program will provide rich opportunities for research and scholarship as well as special events, exhibitions, and publications to engage members of the UMD community and beyond.

Over the course of the fall semester, the undergraduate students in Dr. Alicia Volk’s Japanese Art in the 20th Century colloquium class (ARTH488J) spent hours on the fourth floor of Hornbake Library. That floor houses the Gordon W. Prange Collection, a vast and unique archive of rare Japanese print media consisting of books, magazines, newspapers, posters, maps, and other printed publications that were subjected to censorship by the occupying American forces from 1945 to 1949.

The University of Maryland Libraries’ Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA) invites applications for the inaugural Katherine Anne Porter Research Award.The award provides up to $2000 to support research in the Katherine Anne Porter papers and related holdings in SCUA. Students, faculty, and researchers from the UMD community and beyond are welcome to apply.

A new exhibition has taken root in the Hornbake Library Gallery. “Homegrown: An Introduction to the Environmental Justice Movement” highlights how the environmental justice movement began with the rise of civil rights, labor, and environmentalism movements in the mid-twentieth century. 

This summer, students in the First-Year Innovation and Research Experience (FIRE) summer program led by Dr. Elizabeth Massey, the assistant clinical professor who leads FIRE’s Music and Social Identity stream, worked with Special Collections in Performing Arts (SCPA) in the Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library and Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA) in Hornbake Library to research and create an exhibit titled “Voices of the Counterculture,” focused on social and cultural themes from the 1970s.