The end of the semester is typically a busy time for donations to the archives and Special Collections. Here are a few highlights that have come into the University Archives recently:

UARC 2011-003: President's Office records

This small donation, only .25 linear feet, came from Karen Wensch just before her retirement this Fall. One gem from this donation is a resolution passed in 1992 by the City Council of Baltimore, "in recognition of [Dr. Freeman Hrabowski's] appointment as interim president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County." This demonstrates the relationship between the City of Baltimore and our county campus.

We have a small collection of plaques, honorary degrees, and certificates awarded to Dr. Hrabowski available in our President's Office records.

UARC 2011-001: University Photographs

This beautiful image of the Albin O. Kuhn Library was taken by UMBC's own Tim Ford in the Fall of 2005. Tim is the Manager of Illustrative Services, located in the Biological Sciences building. He has longed served as UMBC's unofficial (and sometimes official) documentarian of campus life and has often worked with campus departments on capturing the events and people that pass through our halls. This image was prepared by Tim as a retirement gift to Pat Cronise, UMBC's former Slide Librarian. If you're looking for historic images of people and places at UMBC, you can contact Special Collections and we can work with you to locate an appropriate photograph within our holdings or from other photograph collections on campus.

UARC Photos-13: University Photographs

While this accession, or group of photographs, is not new to Special Collections, it is being made more accessible because it is being processed. When you process an archival or photography collection, you rehouse, arrange, and describe the collection so that researchers can learn about the materials and locate the items within the collection much easier. Special Collections student assistant Paul Pierson has been rehousing these slides into archival polypropylene sheets and creating a folder listing. These sheets will not off gas or damage the chemical emulsion on the slides. Thanks Paul!

The title image above is from the 1968 Skipjack, UMBC's student yearbook. You can view all of the Skipjack volumes in Special Collections (UPUB S2-001) or browse this volume online.

Beginning January 4, 2011, UMBC has trial access to ShipIndex.org

ShipIndex.org lets you search for information about practically any ship, from famous ships such as the Titanic to less well-known vessels such as the Peter Iredale. ShipIndex.org tells you which books, magazines, and online resources mention the vessels you're researching.

The trial runs through January 25, 2011.

For off-campus access, please login via VPN first (http://vpn.umbc.edu). Then follow the link under "News & Events" on the library homepage. For more info on remote access, see http://aok.lib.umbc.edu/services/remoteaccess.php

Feedback is encouraged. Use the form below or send directly to Drew Alfgren: alfgren@umbc.edu

Beginning January 4, 2011, UMBC has a 2-week trial of the Accessible Archives database.

Accessible Archives contains the rich, comprehensive material found in leading historic periodicals and books. Eyewitness accounts of historical events, vivid descriptions of daily life, editorial observations, commerce as seen through advertisements, and genealogical records are available in a user-friendly online environment.

Resources include: African American Newspapers, Godey`s Lady`s Book, The Liberator, and much more.

The trial runs through January 18, 2011.

For off-campus access, please login via VPN first (http://vpn.umbc.edu). Then follow the link under "News & Events" on the library homepage. For more info on remote access, see http://aok.lib.umbc.edu/services/remoteaccess.php

Feedback is encouraged. Use the form below or send directly to Drew Alfgren: alfgren@umbc.edu

In an effort to highlight the new material that comes into Special Collections every week, Special Collections staff will begin to post brief summaries of some of our recent acquisitions. These highlights may include new items from our Bafford Photography Collection, University Archives, Regional or Personal Manuscripts, the Center for Biological Sciences Archives, or one of our many book collections centered on photography, science fiction, artist books, Maryland and Baltimore history, radical thought, alternative presses, or faculty/staff publications. These materials are open to researchers; please contact Special Collections staff or see our website for more information on all of our holdings.

Collection 85: Television scripts

A unique collection for UMBC! Fifteen boxes of television scripts dating from 1954 to 1978. Includes classics like Batman (scripts from 1965-1967), The Beverly Hillbillies (1961-1964), The Brady Bunch (1970-1972), Mission: Impossible (1968-1972), The Mod Squad (1968-1972), and The Partridge Family (1970-1971).

UARC 2010-026: University Photographs

These four color photographic prints were donated by former Library Director Jonathan LeBreton. The prints show the construction of the Library tower in 1993.

UARC 2010-027: University Photographs

7700 digital images documenting the Office of Student Life, Student Government Association, UMBC's 40th Anniversary, Homecoming, and other campus groups and events. We're working to upload these images into our Digital Collections very soon! So far, only the set from the 2003-2004 acdemic year are available online. The image to the right is from the Winter 2004 Welcome Pep Rally in the Commons Main Street.

The Albin O. Kuhn Library and Gallery is offering extended hours through exams.

* Sundays- Thursdays we will be open until 2 a.m.
* Fridays and Saturdays we will be open until 10 p.m.

Thank you and good luck on your exams!

The Library is currently testing several eBook platforms. Please check them out and complete our online survey to let us know what you think.

We currently have access to the following platforms:

ebrary Academic Complete
Ebrary Academic Complete is a multidisciplinary digital library with more than 47,000 titles. Subjects covered include Anthropology, Business & Economics, Computers & IT, Education, Fine Arts, History, Language & Literature, Law, Life Sciences, Medicine, Physical Sciences, Psychology, Religion, Social Sciences, and Technology. Content includes handbooks, e-books, manuals, reports and other authoritative documents.

Trial runs through December 8, 2010.

MyiLibrary
MyiLibrary provides desktop access to over 235,000 eBooks. Subjects covered include: Philosophy, Psychology, & Religion; History; Geography; Anthropology; Social Sciences; Political Science; Law; Education; Music; Fine Arts; Language & Literature; Science; Medicine; Agriculture; Technology; Military Science; Naval Science.

Trial runs through December 15, 2010.

EBL Ebook Library
EBL offers content across all subject areas, with an initial focus on recent titles - most specifically in the areas of Science, Technology and Medicine (STM). EBL features more than 100,000 titles from hundreds of academic publishers.

You must create a free account from a valid UMBC IP address in order to access the EBL trial.

Trial runs through December 15, 2010.

Springer eBooks
The Springer eBooks trial provides access to over 20,000 eBook titles (2005-2010 copyright only) in twelve subject collections:
* Behavioral Science
* Biomedical and Life Sciences
* Business and Economics
* Chemistry and Materials Science
* Computer Science (including the highly regarded Lecture Notes in Computer Science)
* Earth and Environmental Science
* Engineering
* Humanities, Social Sciences and Law
* Mathematics and Statistics
* Medicine
* Physics and Astronomy
* Professional Computing and Web Design

Titles include textbooks, reference works, monographs, and book series. All titles are fully searchable and hyperlinked.

Trial runs through December 31, 2010

NetLibrary
NetLibrary provides online access to thousands of scholarly books and reference works. Subjects include: computer science, business, international relations, education, environmental science, psychology, civil rights law and history.

UMBC currently has access to a selection of books specifically chosen by Maryland Academic Libraries. Funded by the Maryland Digital Library (MDL).

For off-campus access, please login via VPN first (http://vpn.umbc.edu). Then follow the link under "News & Events" on the library homepage. For more info on remote access, see http://aok.lib.umbc.edu/services/remoteaccess.php

Please check out these trials and then take our online survey.

UMBC now has trial access to the Morningstar Investment Research Center.

The Morningstar Investment Research Center is an all-inclusive investment research database designed specifically for libraries. It features data and analysis on over 11,000 international and domestic stocks, 24,000 mutual funds, and more than 1,000 exchange traded funds.

The trial runs through December 10, 2010.

For off-campus access, please login via VPN first (http://vpn.umbc.edu). Then follow the link under "News & Events" on the library homepage. For more info on remote access, see http://aok.lib.umbc.edu/services/remoteaccess.php

Feedback is encouraged. Use the form below or send directly to Drew Alfgren: alfgren@umbc.edu

UMBC now has trial access to the three AAS Historical Periodicals collections through Dec.24.

EBSCO has partnered with the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) to provide digital access to American periodicals published between 1691 and 1877. In total, more than 6,500 periodicals will be available, eclipsing all other online resources in this area. The collection is divided into three series:
Series 1 presents over 500 titles dating from 1691 through 1820.
On campus direct access: Series1

Series 2 presents over 1,000 titles dating from 1821 through 1837.
On campus direct access: Series 2

Series 3 presents over 1,800 titles dating from 1838 through 1852.
On campus direct access: Series 3

The databases can also be accessed through the EbscoHost platform. Access any Ebsco database, click on "Choose Databases." The three AAS databases are at the end of the list and may be searched individually or in combination.

For off-campus access, please login via VPN first (http://vpn.umbc.edu). Then follow the link under "News & Events" on the library homepage. For more info on remote access, see http://aok.lib.umbc.edu/services/remoteaccess.php

Feedback is encouraged. Use the form below or send directly to Drew Alfgren: alfgren@umbc.edu

UMBC now has trial access to Springer eBooks. The trial runs through December 31, 2010.

NOTE: Trial access is only available for 2005-2010 copyright Springer eBooks from all collections.

The Springer eBooks trial provides access to over 20,000 eBook titles in twelve subject collections:
* Behavioral Science
* Biomedical and Life Sciences
* Business and Economics
* Chemistry and Materials Science
* Computer Science (including the highly regarded Lecture Notes in Computer Science)
* Earth and Environmental Science
* Engineering
* Humanities, Social Sciences and Law
* Mathematics and Statistics
* Medicine
* Physics and Astronomy
* Professional Computing and Web Design

Titles include textbooks, reference works, monographs, and book series. All titles are fully searchable and hyperlinked.

For off-campus access, please login via VPN first (http://vpn.umbc.edu). Then follow the link under "News & Events" on the library homepage. For more info on remote access, see http://aok.lib.umbc.edu/services/remoteaccess.php

Please let us know what you think. Leave a comment or send your comments to Janet Hack at jhack@umbc.edu.

Our final essay for the "In the Archives" series comes to us from English professor Christopher Corbett. Corbett writes a monthly column for Style magazine in Baltimore and has been published by the New York Times, The Washington Post and The Philadelphia Inquirer. His publications include Vacationland, The Poker Bride: A Story of the Chinese in the American Goldfields, and Orphans Preferred: The Twisted Truth and Lasting Legend of the Pony Express, which serves as the basis for his archival recollections.

How I Got That Story

When I was still doing journalism I decided to ride a bus from Osoyoos, British Columbia to Tijuana, Mexico largely to prove that it was still possible to ride a bus from one border of these United States to the other without actually traveling on an interstate highway. The bus company was called the Boise-Winnemucca Stage Lines – it descended from an honest to God stagecoach. My plan proved more complicated than I had hoped it would. But that’s another story.

But that’s how I found myself in Reno, Nevada on a savagely hot summer weekend. The bus had dumped me there.

Americans are not meant to be on foot. I immediately rented a car. And from my base at Fitzgerald’s Hotel, a venerable shrine to what would become Nevada’s reason for existence - gambling - I studied a map of the Silver State.

Virginia City, home of the fabled Comstock Lode, was only 20 miles away. Eureka! I drove down. And from here, in the old boomtown that knew Mark Twain when he was still Sam Clemens, I again studied the map - and saw that I was near Fort Churchill – site of a Pony Express station.

In the John Wayne film that plays in my head, Fort Churchill looked exactly like a Pony Express station should. A cluster of adobe buildings on a wind-blown sward of sand in the Nevada desert with the distant snow-capped peaks of the Sierra Nevada, like a kind of Shangri-la, on the horizon.

I knew nothing about the Pony Express – which was actually called the Central Overland California & Pike’s Peak Express Company during its brief and financially disastrous life – April 3, 1860 to October 26, 1861.

Back East, I began to think about “the Pony” as old people in the West still called it. I began to read. One book led to another. I poked around. The books were wildly contradictory and many appeared to be the work of fantasists. It took no time and little scholarship to realize that the story of the Pony Express was really a story of how something got to be a story – or in its case, an American whopper. There had not been a book in half a century. Eureka! I got to work.

My research into the story of this story would take me to the fabled Huntington Library in southern California and to the Newberry Library in Chicago and on to the Library of Congress and to the historical archives of the eight states that the Pony crossed from Missouri to Kansas, to Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada and California. I went to the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming in Laramie and I went to the cellar of the library at Willliam Jewell College in Liberty, Missouri where packed away in some dusty boxes were the extensive papers of one of the few real historians to ever have a look at this tale, which one early chronicler called “a tale of truth, half-truth and no truth at all.”

I am a big fan of libraries because of this pilgrimage. It’s like fishing. You don’t always get a bite but you can’t fish at home. You have to get out there and do some legwork as the old denizens of Grub Street called it. Shoe leather! I found things that had never appeared in print before. I tracked down stuff that went a long way toward explaining America’s appetite for what Bernard DeVoto called “the borderland of fable” that place where fact and fancy collide. There’s a lot of that territory across the wide Missouri.

This year is the 150th anniversary of the Pony Express and I am often asked to speak from Phoenix, Arizona to Nebraska City, Nebraska and points in between. People ask is anything true? Have you learned anything? What can you tell us?

I tell them that one day I drove to Topeka, Kansas – the state capital. I had been there before. I was rooting about in the vertical files and archives in the Kansas State Historical Society looking for bits of the story of the Pony Express. I had reached the point where I thought I knew a lot - or at least more than I had known. There I came across a yellowed index card in an old-fashioned card file that you see less and less nowadays. It was a citation pertaining to an interview? An old lady in Marysville, Kansas, the Marshall County seat, gave this interview in the 1930s to a local historian. On the reverse side of the index card someone had scrawled, “she saw the Pony Express.”

I asked to see the manuscript, which some poor soul had painstakingly transcribed – typed on onionskin paper. Here were the memories of an old lady who had come to Kansas when there were still wolves and Indians and immense herds of buffalo. She was a German immigrant. There were whole towns of Germans out there. Towns with names like Bremen and Hanover. She taught school for years and years. And when she was a young woman, not much older than her students, she rode her pony overland 20 miles to a schoolhouse each week to teach the farmer’s children. She carried a long barrel pistol in her waistband and remembered that although she never shot an Indian she shot at a few. It was a hard world on the prairie.

Her maiden name was Elizabeth Mohrbacher. She was living in Marysville when the British explorer Sir Richard Burton – headed to have a look at the Mormons – hit town. And she was there when they raised the flag when Kansas became a state. And there too, when Sam Clemens, a recent Confederate army deserter passed through town headed for the territory ahead. And she was there when the Pony Express arrived after a 100-mile dash from St. Joseph, Missouri. She remembered it in wonderful detail. This was no bar story. This was no dime novel. These were not the recollections of an established fraud like William Frederick Cody. Here was an old lady on the Kansas plains who had seen America and lived a life out of a Willa Cather novel. Here was perhaps the last living American to have actually seen “the swift phantom of the desert,” as Twain called the Pony Express rider.

On mornings like that - even in Topeka, Kansas - every bit of research is worth it and all the disappointments and the trips that seemed pointless and the leads that did not pan out don’t matter much anymore. I could not believe that I had found her. She had been waiting for me for a long, long time.

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Learn more about all of our Archives Month activities!