This is the sixth year of celebrating American Archives Month at UMBC! This year we're looking deep into our institution’s shared history with the physical space that we occupy today. On display in the Library Rotunda are photographs, artifacts, and clippings from the Stabler family papers (Collection 27), which were donated by the descendants of Edmund Stabler, a long-serving superintendent of the Baltimore Manual Labor School. An online exhibit about the School will also be available this month. Both of the exhibits were curated by recent UMBC graduate Nichole Zang, with assistance from Special Collections graduate student assistant Tucker Foltz and Archivist Lindsey Loeper. Nichole’s History M.A. thesis informed the work on display; a copy of her thesis, “Holy Temples to Dark Rooms: The Origins of Baltimore’s Juvenile Reform Movement of the Nineteenth Century,” is also available in Special Collections.

American Archives Month is a collaborative effort by professional organizations and repositories around the nation to highlight the importance of records of enduring value. Archivists are professionals who assess, collect, organize, preserve, maintain control of, and provide access to information that has lasting value, and they help people find and understand the information they need in those records. - Society of American Archivists, www.archivist.org