Unlike a general Google or online search, BASE targets academic sources, ensuring that the results are relevant and of high quality. With over 31 million documents and 2 thousand content providers, this website is a great resource for academic researchers in every field from biochemistry to dance. And, best news yet - it's free! So start your searching!

UMBC's Digital Collections will be added to BASE this fall - making it a one-stop-shop for locating digital resources from UMBC, UMD, and beyond.

Sample entry from the Australian Institute of Marine Science:

Written by Johanna Schein, Special Collections Graduate Assistant.

Even if you aren't (yet) an alum, you might still be interested in this collection. The citations within each program highlight the achievements of many notable scholars, artists, authors, journalists, and Marylanders. Filled with photographs and writings, the commencement programs also provide a great insight into the evolution of UMBC's campus, both in terms of its academic and physical growth. These programs reveal that although technology, fashion, academic majors, and UMBC's campus have all changed over the years, there is continuity in UMBC's traditions and values, which can be found in the rituals of each graduation.

Interested in testing your UMBC knowledge? Here is some trivia that can be answered by looking at the commencement programs.

1) In what year was UMBC's first commencement?
2) Which undergraduate major had the most graduates in UMBC's first graduation?
3) Which famous psychologist, who invented the operant conditioning chamber, spoke at UMBC Commencement in 1973?
4) In which UMBC commencement did the University grant is first doctorate?
5) Which UMBC Chancellor graduated Phi Beta Kappa from University of Maryland College in 1958 and was listed on the Who's Who in America?
6) Which 1979 Nobel Prize in Economics winner, known for his focus on the underdevelopment and poverty in third-world countries, gave the commencement address in 1983?
7) Which 1959 Nobel Prize in Medicine winner, who is known for his research on the biosynthesis of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), received an honorary degree from UMBC in 1991?
8) Which U.S. Senator, who is the longest serving woman in the Senate, gave the commencement address in 1993?
9) In which year does UMBC's mascot, True Grit, first appear in the commencement program?

Cover of the first UMBC commencement program.

Cover of the 1995 commencement program. Notice the 0s and 1s in the background, indicative of the 1990s technology boom. The introduction of the program declared the 1995 commencement exercises to be a "high-tech production."

Answers: 1) 1970; 2) History, followed closely by Psychology; 3) B.F. Skinner 4)1976 5) John W. Dorsey 6) Sir William Arthur Lewis 7)Arthur Kornberg 8) Barbara Mikulski 9) 1989

Written by Johanna Schein, Special Collections Graduate Assistant. These items were digitized in partnership with the Office of Institutional Advancement.

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.

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.

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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The Baby Resting on a Skull

Whether it’s digging into faded texts of Renaissance alchemy for a play that I’m writing, or excavating times gone by on the campus of our university for an article in UMBC Magazine, the thrill of chasing down knowledge in archives never goes away.

Archives are a double affirmation. First, the archive affirms that there are substantive parts of our experience – our words and objects and images and artifacts – which are worth keeping, worth guarding, and worth tender and attentive care. And yet, despite that necessary emphasis on jealous care and preservation, the archives enact the delightful paradox of ensuring and promoting access – by researchers and the general public – to these materials.

My most exciting recent encounters in archives came as I was writing my play, Burn Your Bookes, about the 16th Century alchemist Edward Kelley and his step-daughter, the Neo-Latin poet Elizabeth Jane Weston. In the archives of Harvard University’s Houghton Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Library of Congress, I gained access to books owned by Kelley’s employer, John Dee, held Weston’s books of poetry (printed in Frankfurt and Prague in the early 17th Century) in my hands, and read (with fascination and profit) an English translation of famous alchemist and physician Oswald Croll’s Alchemical Basilisk – which includes recipes for aurum potabile (“drinkable gold”).

A playwright who writes about history always finds excitement in getting closer to his sources. The Folger Shakespeare Library, for instance, has a copy of a book owned by John Dee that has the Renaissance polymath’s copious marginalia scribbled in an essay on demonology. Seeing the deep grooves that Dee’s pen cut into the page of that book gave me a sense of the intensity of his character and his quest for occult knowledge. Comparing two different versions of Weston’s first book, Poemata, allowed me to examine at firsthand a discrepancy between the two editions noted by two scholars – Donald Cheney and Brenda Hosington. Cheney and Hosington discovered that the Harvard version of the book had a line on the cover giving imperial sanction to its publication intact, but that the version in the Folger had that line cancelled out. The discrepancy – and the obvious agency behind it – provided me with a key plot point in the play.

Indeed, the Houghton Library’s copy of Weston’s second book, Parthenica, also proved to be a revelation. Both of Weston’s books were published by a Silesian nobleman named George Martinius Baldhofen. Poemata was a small, plain book. But the Parthenica was a much more elaborate production – stuffed not only with Weston’s poems but with poems by literary luminaries and Weston’s correspondence with them. Weston did not supervise the edition, so the book is truly a window on the fascinating character of Baldhofen, right down to its fanciful frontispiece, with human figures and birds woven into an intricate pattern – and an infant reclining its elbow on a human skull! The fancy and extravagance married to morbidity that was only revealed by close examination of the book gave me strong material to write Baldhofen’s part in the play.

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Learn more about all of our Archives Month activities!