The Special Collections department at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County has two open field study placements for the Fall 2026 semester. Part of the Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery at UMBC, Special Collections collects materials of enduring historical and cultural value—housing, preserving, and making accessible materials that are original, rare, unique, fragile, and archival. Our collections and staff support UMBC’s research and educational mission and its dedication to cultural and ethnic diversity, social responsibility, and lifelong learning. UMBC is located in Catonsville, Maryland, just off of I-95, 695, and 195. Parking will be provided. Interested students should submit a current resume and 3 professional or educational references to Beth Saunders, curator and associate director of Special Collections, at bethsaunders@umbc.edu. Application review will begin in July and applications will be accepted until the positions are filled.
Collection Level Records
UMBC Special Collections plans to adopt Archives Space as our new content management system as our collections have outgrown our current system, PastPerfect. For this project, we are performing a mass review and standardization of our records to support this transition. It is our ultimate goal to have a public facing record for each archival collection to significantly improve access to our unprocessed collections.
The metadata standardization intern would exclusively work on ensuring that the required fields to publish a collection level record for unprocessed collections are complete. This position provides the selected student an opportunity to learn and expand on their research skills while aiding our department in increasing the visibility of our collections. This is also a publishing opportunity for students, as they will be listed as a co-author of finding aids, the primary descriptive resource of an archival collection.
Students will be provided various research tools to reference, including our current content management system, PastPerfect, to populate a standardized google form, which will give Special Collections staff access to data that can be quickly published to our Special Collections finding aid site.
Maryland 250 Outreach and Exhibition
UMBC Special Collections will be participating in the statewide Maryland 250 celebration this Fall. Our collections include extensive documentation of Maryland’s history including social activism, media and print culture, documentary and fine art photography, folklife traditions and artistic communities, and more! MD250 activities will include a multi-author blog series highlighting collection items that support research about Maryland communities, artists, and industry; at least two physical exhibits in the Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery’s Rotunda display space; an outreach event for the UMBC campus community; and related promotional content on the Special Collections Instagram page (@umbcspecialcollections).
The field study student will contribute to these projects throughout the semester by:
assisting with photo documentation,
text and display creation, editing, scheduling, and publication,
exhibit planning, design, and installation,
and staffing events.
The student will work directly with a broad range of collection materials and will gain experience writing about historical, primary source items for a general audience. Experience working with WordPress or a similar web publishing platform is preferred. The student will have the opportunity to co-curate at least one exhibit using collection items from Special Collections. The student will also learn general Special Collections procedures for security, handling, digitization, and general use of collection materials. While weekly on-site work at UMBC will be required, this may be structured as a hybrid position.
When I started working in an archive, I had a vague vision of what that would look like. Mostly, it involved carefully handling rare, centuries old books, painstakingly cataloging collections, and rehousing the materials in fancy grey acid free boxes. I didn’t expect to become a photography detective. But over the past three months, that’s exactly what I’ve been doing.
Special Collections graduate assistant Reese Finningan
Let me start at the beginning. I was hired to be the graduate assistant in the Albin O. Kuhn Special Collections and Archives a year ago, upon my acceptance into the graduate program to study history. I started in August, and spent the first few months training and acclimating to the new position. At the end of October, I got my first long-term assignment, working with the curator and head of the department on their project.
The year prior was the fiftieth anniversary of our photography collection, and in the fall of 2024, they had put on an exhibit in our gallery showcasing the collection. The project was to turn that exhibition into an exhibit catalogue — a type of art book which contains all the objects from the exhibition and their context. For me, this meant pulling all the photographs which were showcased for digitization and measurement.
Over the next four months, I went through the process of locating individual photographs in our collection of over two million. Using our database records, I found their shelf location, removed them from the box, measured the sheet and the image, and set them aside for digitizing, before reshelving them in their permanent home. Over that time, more photographs got added to the project, making this a continual cycle, until finally, in late February, we got to our final image set of over two hundred fifty.
As simple as the process seems, it required meticulousness to ensure the correct items were being removed, and that they were returned to their proper location. In some cases, even the first step of pulling the photograph wasn’t straightforward. A very simple problem-solution set, paired without updating a small detail in the record, can make items much more difficult to find. For example, many of the photographs I couldn’t initially find had been relocated due to size. For the exhibition, they’d been placed into mats, making them larger than the original box they were housed in. When they were reshelved, they had to be moved to a larger box, and sometimes this move got missed in updated records. A few of them even came from unprocessed collections, meaning there was no detailed record of them in the first place!
About half of the boxes that house the photo prints from the Baltimore Sun collection
These miniscule adjustments created a series of miniature mysteries for me to solve. At the end of January, once I’d gone through the entire image set and collected all the photographs, I was left with a stack of images I couldn’t find on the first pass. Double checking the information on the call slips against the information in our online databases quickly helped me find several photographs, which had typos in the original call number or location on my first search. For others, I searched in boxes by photographer last name, or photographic process.
Eventually, I was left with half a dozen or so odd cases, photographs which were decidedly not in their listed location, but which didn’t have an obvious resolution. Luckily, I had time on my side. These photos didn’t need to be pulled quickly – they needed to be tracked down and recovered through the kind of patient, precise detective work that archival research often requires and caring for a collection demands. I rolled my sleeves up, pulled on my gloves, and got to work. Using the information I had about the photograph as clues, I searched full boxes until, one by one, I found what I needed.
The missing photo on exhibition
After about a month of this meticulous, slow search, I’d found all but one photograph, and everyone in the archive knew it was going to be the most difficult to track down. The photo had come from our collection of prints and negatives from the Baltimore Sun, a sweeping collection of more than three hundred boxes. The prints we have are arranged by subject, not by date or photographer, and for many of them, we have very little identifying information. Such was the case for this one: all we had was a title, (potentially created by the curator for the exhibition,) the photograph measurements, and a few blurry pictures of it in the exhibition.
This is where my detective work really came into play. Applying the few clues I had to my growing knowledge of our photography collection, I searched almost two dozen boxes in search of this photograph. Knowing the photo had been matted for the exhibition, I began with our photography collection, guessing it had been reshelved there after the exhibition. The photographer wasn’t identified: I searched the four “photographer unknown” boxes we have, with no results. Knowing the photograph was from the Baltimore Sun, I searched the two boxes of our Baltimore collection: nothing. In the exhibition spreadsheet, it was tagged as “Baltimore Camera Club,” but it wasn’t in our boxes for that collection either. Within the Baltimore Sun boxes, I searched by subject, based on the data I had and on what I was seeing in the images I’d been sent: “Fashion,” “Model,” “Swimsuit,” “Bathing Suits,” “Baltimore Camera Club,” and so on. By this point, I’d recruited most of the department into brainstorming ideas, and was actively encouraging people to think outside the box on where it could be. But after a few weeks of this, I’d still not been able to locate the photograph, and I was ready to give up.
In a last ditch effort, I decided to really think outside the box, and searched in the box titled “Art.” In that box, I found a folder titled “Art/Photography,” with a subfolder for “Art/Photography/Baltimore Camera Club Exhibition.” My heart jumped; this felt like the breakthrough I’d been waiting for. About twenty images in, suddenly, I saw those recognizable stripes and figures I had been looking for since October. Months of small clues, dead ends, and careful checking had finally come to an end. It was hard to contain my pride and satisfaction — I may have done a Tiger Woods-style fist pump. There’s a particular joy in archival work when patience and persistence pay off like that, a quiet thrill in realizing that a piece of the collection that once seemed lost had simply been waiting in the right place to be found again.
Baltimore Sun photographs
As I continue to learn on the job, I gain new insights to a career in the archives every day. One of the biggest things I’ve learned so far is that we live in an imperfect world. Archivists love order, but try as we might, we can’t control everything, and unfortunately, things like dust, age, and human error can cause real problems. But this doesn’t mean that we should just give up, or stop trying. Instead, it’s even more important to think creatively and approach problems from multiple perspectives. When faced with road blocks, use the information you have, and the people around you, to find a new path to the destination you aim to get. Persistence and optimism will take you far!
And so, for now, that’s my life in the archive: part preservationist, part cataloger, and occasionally, part detective. Each box and folder holds its own small mysteries, and every solved puzzle feels like restoring a tiny piece of the historical record. While I may still spend plenty of time rehousing materials in those familiar grey boxes, I’ve learned that archival work is just as much about curiosity and persistence as it is about order and organization. The search for a missing photograph might seem small, but moments like that are a reminder of why the work matters: because every item we preserve, find, and make accessible helps ensure that the stories contained in the archive continue to be seen and understood.
This post was written by Reese Finnigan, Special Collections graduate assistant and MA student in the department of History at UMBC. Thank you, Reese!
We often think of books as sacrosanct – and as a librarian, I have to agree! Many people can’t abide writing in, dog-earing, or otherwise defacing a book. But there are cases where changing the structure of a book can be a creative rather than a destructive endeavor. Enter the altered book.
What is an altered book?
Altered books are “a form of mixed media artwork that changes a book from its original form into a different form,” thereby changing both its functionality and its meaning. These alterations can be, according to book artist Barbara Pearman “as simple as adding a drawing or text to a page, or as complex as creating an intricate book sculpture.” Over the past year, I have had the opportunity to catalog two altered books for Special Collections. While they were very different from one another, each presented a similar cataloging challenge, and a similar opportunity to reflect on the meaning of printed books.
1. Index, 2014-2024
The first of these two altered books was Index, 2014-2024, which we added to our Bafford Photography collection in December 2024. In this work, photographer Jordanna Kalman inserted prints of her own photographs into an existing book: The History of Photographyby Beaumont Newhall.
Newhall’s book is a seminal work on photographic history, but notably, only 4% of the photographs in his book were taken by women. Kalman’s work is a response to that imbalance: by inserting her own works into the book, she is making a statement about the lack of women’s representation in the field of photography, while simultaneously refuting it.
2. The Worlds to Which we Pass at Death
Kalman’s altered book is a kind of conversation: the substrate (the book being altered) is as much a part of the message as what she adds to it. By contrast, the second altered book I cataloged for our collection appears to have been created with much less intentionality in its choice of substrate.
This second altered book is titled The Worlds to Which we Pass at Death. Written by Rev. George Vale Owen in the 1920s, it is an example of “automatic writing,” a process in which spirits allegedly possess a medium and communicate using their body to write. This piece of Owen’s work was originally published in the newspaper The Weekly Dispatch, but at some point thereafter, an anonymous reader took their newsprint copy and pasted it into the pages of the novel Alton Locke by Charles Kingsley. It was this hybridized hardback copy that I cataloged as part of the Eileen J. Garrett Parapsychology Foundation Collection in August 2025.
Unlike Kalman’s Index, it doesn’t appear as if this creator intended the underlying book to be a notable part of the finished product. In fact, they removed all evidence of the original book by covering its title and publication information and cutting out all additional pages. I even had to shine a light through the title page in order to read the original title and finish my cataloging! This implies that their main motivation was preservation: by pasting the fragile newsprint into a hardcover book, this anonymous reader was attempting to prevent Owen’s work from being damaged.
And yet, the choice to transform the text from newsprint to monograph seems like more than just a utilitarian measure. I think it speaks to the lingering regard for the book as a source of legitimacy that this unknown spiritualist wanted to see Owen’s words between the covers of a hardback book. In a way, Kalman’s work too speaks to this shared regard: it is only because she treats The History of Photography as a stand-in for society’s collective consciousness that her act of adding women literally to the book can take on the significance of adding them symbolically to the annals of human knowledge.
Cataloging challenges
From a cataloging perspective, each of these items presented a unique challenge. While we have to treat the altered copy as a separate work from its unaltered original, it is still important to acknowledge the connection between them in the catalog record. The way I went about recording this was by adding a citation for the substrate text under “Related Titles.” If you click on one of the links above to view the catalog record of either altered book, you will see a hyperlinked title near the bottom of the record:
You will also see the term “Altered Books” listed under “Genre” – clicking this will pull up a list of all items in the library’s collection that are either examples of altered books, or discuss them:
Conclusion
The relationship between books and readers is never a neutral one: we transform books every time we use them, wearing out their spines and hinges little by little. But altered books take this transformational aspect of readership to a whole new level – and in doing so, help remind us of our tactile relationship with the printed word.
In earlier periods of book history, humans would create paper, set type, and sew bindings entirely by hand. In the modern era, when much of this process has been passed along to machines, altered books remind us of the materiality of books – even going so far as to turn an entire, finished book into a raw material to be deconstructed and re-shaped into a new object.
If you’re interested in exploring altered books further, you can check out this online exhibition from the National Museum of Women in the Arts. You can even make your own altered book from an outdated reference book or other work from a secondhand store that no one is likely to need in the future. Artist Lisa Vollrath even has a crash course on altered books on her website. Just make sure you don’t use any books from the UMBC library!
This post was written by Hannah Jones, Catalog & Metadata Librarian in the Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery’s Bibliographic and Metadata Services department. Thank you, Hannah!
In June 2025 Susan Graham, Special Collections Librarian, and Lindsey Loeper, Reference and Instruction Archivist, worked with three amazing undergraduate students as part of UMBC’s Interdisciplinary CoLab: Finley Bandy ’26, history, Dagmawi Delelegne ’26 computer science, and Samantha Nguyen ’26, graphic design. This 4-week summer internship pairs groups of three students with UMBC faculty to tackle a research project. For our project we wanted to update our existing outreach videos, which we use to introduce classes and with new researchers to using Special Collections, with a key focus on peer-to-peer communication.
Throughout the month our student researchers learned about Special Collections, what questions and needs new researchers have, and thought about how these videos could help them. They also had three workshops with Kristen Anchor, professor of media and communication studies, to learn about the best practices of video production.
Finley, Dagmawi, and Samantha completed three videos as part of their Special Collections 101 series: What to Expect, Handling Materials, and Collection Highlights. They also left us with a supply of video footage of our collections and interviews with Library staff that we can use to make additional videos. Check out all three of their videos below!
Special Collections 101: What to Expect. Whether you’re coming to the Special Collections department at UMBC for the first time with a class or to do your own research, this video will show you what you can expect when you visit. Where is the reading room, and what is it? What you can bring – and what you can’t. How can students and researchers use the materials available in Special Collections? Who is Gef?! Learn this and more.
Special Collections 101: Handling Materials. One of the priorities of Special Collections is preserving the quality and longevity of our materials so that they can be accessible for future researchers. Watch this video to learn about the guidelines that we have in place for handling materials like books, photographs, and archival collections.
Special Collections 101: Collection Highlights. In this video, you’ll hear from Library faculty and staff members about their favorite items in Special Collections, including the Rosenfeld science fiction collection, the University Archives, and the Mills of Baltimore County collection.
Every attempt to organize an alternative political party outside the Democratic and Republican Parties has faced the same question: how should they relate to the two dominant parties? Marxist parties in the 1980s were no exception. Though leftists were divided in this period over a variety of issues, one of the most significant splits emerged over how they should relate to the Democratic Party. Should they collaborate with liberal Democrats to seek policy victories that could help their shared constituencies? Publicly denounce the party in hopes of winning over disenchanted Democrats? Or try to do both simultaneously? These strategic differences were publicly aired in communist newspapers, which diverged widely in their coverage of Democrats. Preserved in the Alternative Press Center Collection at UMBC’s Special Collections, newspapers like People’s World, Workers Vanguard, and Workers World represented distinct tendencies within Marxism and belonged to different political parties. This collection serves as an invaluable resource for researchers seeking to understand how radical forces sought to transform the country from a position of weakness.
People’s Worldis the newspaper of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA). The Party and the paper were known for their support of organized labor, civil rights, and the Soviet Union. Although the number of Communists was small, they exerted influence through partnerships with liberal Democrats and non-Communist activist groups on a local level.1 This strategy of cooperation meant that the People’s World took stances to the right of the broader progressive movement. After Democratic nominee Tom Bradley narrowly lost the 1982 California gubernatorial election, People’s World editor Carl Bloice accused the left-wing Peace and Freedom Party of splitting the progressive vote by running its own gubernatorial candidate. In doing so, left-wing opponents of Bradley cost California its first Black governor. Implicit in the Party’s defense of Bradley was a broader defense of liberalism. Bloice made it clear that the paper supported Bradley not just because of his race, although that factor was emphasized, but because he was the best candidate. He thus communicated the CPUSA’s stance to its membership and supporters that the best way to get anything close to socialism is to elect liberal Democrats.2
Workers Vanguardtook a more radical line, harshly criticizing liberal Democrats and seeking to establish a separate political pole. This was not surprising given the publisher. The Spartacist League sought to radicalize the civil rights, labor, feminist, and student movements in a revolutionary direction. Tactically, this meant taking the most left-wing stance on every issue. By doing so, the League sought to discredit the Democratic Party by pointing to the contradictions between its actions in government and its claims to represent the most vulnerable.3
Their article “Genocide U.S.A.” is an illustrative example of this. It accuses the Reagan administration and the Democratic-controlled Congress of seeking to commit genocide against Black Americans by cutting welfare. The language was deliberately inflammatory, comparing the name of the bill (the Family Security Act) to the “Work Makes you Free” sign in Auschwitz. Though much of the article was targeted at conservative Democrats in Congress, liberal Democrats were not treated any better. By rallying behind the Democratic Party, liberals were manipulating Black workers to vote for candidates who supported slashing social spending. The obvious solution was to support the real party for the working class: the Spartacist League. Thus, their primary tactics were apparent: using disenchantment with the Democrats as an agitational tool to recruit potential supporters.4
Workers World, published by the Party of the same name, took a middle ground on the issue of how to relate to the Democratic Party. Like the CPUSA and the Spartacist League, the Workers World Party (WWP) embedded itself in multiple social movements. Beginning with its role in organizing against the Vietnam War during the 1960s, the Party branched out into civil rights, organized labor, and gay liberation by the 1970s. Despite this coalition-building, the Party sought to retain strategic independence in whatever field it went.5 The Party’s desire for strategic autonomy as part of a broader progressive movement is reflected in its relationship with the Democratic Party. Though it harshly criticized the Congressional Democratic Party’s support for austerity, its coverage of Jesse Jackson’s 1988 presidential campaign was laudatory. The paper praised Jackson as someone who could unite working-class Americans across racial lines. Notably, this coverage coincided with the Workers WorldParty running its candidates for president and vice-president. The likely reason for this discrepancy was tactical. By supporting the Jackson campaign, the paper sought to forge links between the Party and Jackson’s base, while also setting the stage to gain support from dissatisfied Democrats if Jackson failed to win the nomination.6
Of course, all these tactical decisions emerged from a position of weakness. A bipartisan coalition devoted to cutting taxes and slashing welfare firmly held power in American society during this period.7 This mostly unified power bloc contrasted with the fragmented and isolated left. However, Marxist newspapers provide a revealing lens into how people outside the halls of power sought to influence politics. Whether by defending liberal politicians, denouncing Democratic hypocrisies, or forging links with rank-and-file Democrats, the newspapers reflect the complexities of trying to build coalitions that could implement socialist policies in a deeply hostile political environment.
This post was written by Yoni Isaacs, ’22, history, M.A. ’26, history, a graduate assistant in Special Collections. Thank you, Yoni!
Bibliography
Newspapers
Bloice, Carl. “P&F takes issue; Jews and the Freeze.” People’s World, Jan. 15, 1983.
Chediac, Joyce. “Workfare: an Idea the Rich Always Loved.” Workers World, June 30, 1988.
Joyce Chediac, “Workfare: an Idea the Rich Always Loved.” Workers World, June 30, 1988; Monica Moorehead, “Jackson Victory Jolts Racist Political Machine: Solid Black Support, Gains Among White Workers, Poor.” Workers World, March 17, 1988. ↩︎
Doug Rossinow, The Reagan Era: A History of the 1980s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). ↩︎
