Today's pick:  Freedom : a photographic history of the African American struggle

 

 

THE CENTURY OF THE BODY: 100 PHOTOWORKS OF 1900-2000

BOYSTOWN: LA ZONA DE TOLERANCIA

Join us in a celebration of libraries.

This post was written by Special Collections student assistant Jen Wachtel. Thank you, Jen!

The Retriever Weekly, our university’s proud student newspaper, began publishing as UMBC News in 1966. Special Collections and the University Archives maintain the print copies of all issues of the Retriever, and a large section of the issues (1966-1981 and 2002 to the present) are available online in UMBC's Digital Collections. With monetary support from UMBC's Office of Institutional Advancement, students and staff have been preparing to send the remaining issues to Creekside Digital, a digitization vendor located a short drive away in Glen Arm, MD. This project is a part of the Lyrasis Digitization Collaborative.

I conducted an inventory of the issues of the Retriever dating from January 1983 to May 1997, totaling over four hundred newspapers. Along the way, I found insights into some of UMBC’s hot-button topics of the 1980s and 1990s, including contentious construction projects and students’ demands for increased parking spaces (ed. note - complaining about parking is a long-standing UMBC tradition!). I particularly enjoyed following the timeline of the university administration, including the appointment of one Freeman A. Hrabowski III to Vice Provost at UMBC and his later position as Interim President for a “full academic year and possibly longer.” Of course, no inventory of The Retriever would be complete without the satirical Deceiver. Published annually on the week of April 1^st, the Deceiver  featured such choice headlines as “Giant Terrapin attacks UMBC” (referring to College Park’s mascot) and “SCHPORTZ” (1993).

Jen Wachtel working in Special Collections.

I also noticed some strange anomalies in The Retriever’s numbering system. From miswritten Roman numerals (XXVIV for 29 and IXX for 24) to a startling continuity error, the Retriever always had special surprises in store. The most bizarre circumstance was that in the academic year 1995-96, the Retriever accidentally published two separate versions of Volume 31 – one for fall, and one for spring, before continuing with Volumes 32 and 33 in 1996-97. This means that since spring 1996, every volume of The Retriever has been one number short!

Special Collections is located on the first floor of the library behind the gallery. We are open Monday through Friday from 1-4pm, on Thursdays from 1-8pm, and by appointment.

This post was written by Special Collections Graduate Assistant Nichole Zang. Thank you, Nichole!

UMBC Special Collections is pleased to announce that the Office of Institutional Advancement records are now open to researchers! This collection contains newspaper clippings, press releases, Office of Arts and Management publications, and information on UMBC faculty and departments from the 1960s through 2009. This collection is useful tool for any researcher looking into the university’s exciting past.

The first series of the collection is composed of about forty years of newspaper clippings relating to UMBC. The many clippings in these files share parallels for what we may see around campus today. In August of 1975, for example, construction on the Library Pond began as a flood control dam, creating a scene not unlike the one students walk past on their way to class every day. Come see what other exciting news stories were written about UMBC over the past 50 years!

For anyone looking for the university’s statements on university events between 1963 and 1991, this is also the collection to choose! Series II of the collection contains press releases from those years, arranged by date. The Office of University Relations created the releases for the media in order to inform them of commencements, awards ceremonies, campus events, and other university news. One of these releases describes the festivities of the Fine Arts Building’s open house in November 1975. The newly constructed building was intended to house the visual and performing arts concentrations, as well as art exhibits and performances.

Are you interested in past UMBC art, dance, or gallery events? The Office of Arts Management series of the collection includes publications and photographs printed for advertisement of various shows throughout campus, including Shakespeare on Wheels, theatre and dance performances.

The collections also consists a select number of records regarding university faculty, departments, and other campus events from the mid-1970s to late-2000s. Topics of these files include the proposed UMBC and UMB merger, commencement ceremonies, faculty member CVs and correspondence, and the education department.

A finding aid is available on the Special Collections website.

Special Collections has a new music collection available for you to come and explore! Whether you’re a musician-in-training or simply a lover of the classics, you now have access to an impressive collection of noted concert violinist and conductor Robert Gerle’s personal, marked scores. At UMBC, Gerle is perhaps best known for beginning the orchestral program here and remaining its conductor for nearly two decades. In addition to conducting the UMBC Orchestra, Gerle also taught at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, and the Mannes College of Music in New York.

In 1972, when the first concert was planned, UMBC’s music major was actually in jeopardy of being removed from the school by the Maryland Council on Higher Education. The council cited that there were other, similar programs offered by nearby University of Maryland institutions and therefore did not need to be repeated. Despite this threat, the UMBC Orchestra’s inaugural concert remained slated to take place on December 11, 1972. To read all of the details, be sure to check out the Retriever article in our Digital Collections (hint: take a look at pages 1 and 5)! Scores from several of the pieces played at this concert can be found in the collection, including Richard Wagner’s “Overture to Die Meistersinger,” Wagner’s only comic opera.

Robert Gerle was born in 1924 to Jewish Hungarian parents. According to a New York Times article [1] published in 1958, during World War II Gerle and 26 other Hungarian Jews were caught and arrested by a group of Soviet soldiers while they were hiding in the crawl space above a music professor’s house. The Soviet soldiers suspected them of being snipers. As Gerle was brought before the firing squad, the officer in charge noticed his violin case and demanded that he play a work by Tschaikovsky. A student of the Franz Liszt Academy of Music and the Hungarian National Conservatory of Music, Gerle’s technique impressed the officer. He was convinced that Gerle was a musician, not a soldier. Gerle’s technique, which would be coined as “flawless” later in his career, supposedly saved not only his life, but the lives of the 26 other individuals with him.

When the war ended, Gerle began to play concert engagements in both New York and London, becoming best known for his performances of Back’s Chaconne for solo violin and Heinrich Biber’s violin sonatas. He and his wife, Marilyn Neely - also a UMBC professor - even won an Emmy for the video presentation of the complete Beethoven violin and piano sonatas.

The Gerle collection was transferred from College Park last year. It contains a wide variety of musical scores and compositions, ranging from full orchestral pieces to solo violin pieces. The collection contains not only classics such as Beethoven’s 9th Symphony and Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, but also a host of lesser known treasures to explore. My personal favorite is Vivaldi’s Violin-Konzert, Ops. 3, No. 6. This score, just one of Gerle’s many personal marked scores, is available for you to come in and take a look at. Check out our finding aid for more information!

[1] MEYER BERGER. "About New York." New York Times (1923-Current File), Oct 20, 1958. http://search.proquest.com/docview/114511079?accountid=14577.

This post was written by Special Collections Graduate Assistant Jessi Deane. Thank you, Jessi!