About University AlbUM

University AlbUM is a digital collection that highlights images illustrating the rich history of the University of Maryland. The collection documents a wide variety of topics including student life, athletic events, student athletes, faculty, agricultural pursuits, commencement ceremonies, campus facilities, and much more. Images date from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century, and document the University's 150 plus year history.

The impetus for this collection was the University's 150th anniversary celebration, which concluded in late 2006. Requests for digital copies of photographs from the media and on- and off-campus departments, units, offices, and individuals began flooding into the University Archives in early 2005. One major project produced over 660 digital images and resulted in the University-produced documentary Keeping the Promise: The Rise of the University of Maryland. The University Archives tracked the creation of thousands of scanned images in a local database that has now migrated into a public digital repository.

The digital images within University AlbUM have been generated from original and often unique materials within the University of Maryland Libraries Special Collections. While the majority of the images are drawn from the University Archives, other Special Collections are represented in the AlbUM as well, including photographs from the Baltimore News American Photograph Collection and materials from the Historical Manuscripts unit. University AlbUM serves as an interface to unite images across Special Collections that document University of Maryland history.

While University AlbUM serves as an excellent general resource for examples of historical images relating to the University of Maryland, this collection is by no means exhaustive. University AlbUM represents only a very small sampling of the estimated 500,000+ photographs within the University Archives, not to mention the images contained within other collections in the University of Maryland Libraries. Although the archivists and curators of Special Collections materials would like to have every image available in digital format for our users, the enormity of our holdings precludes this option at present. In the future, we hope to incorporate additional images into this digital album.