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History of UMBC

This guide contains information about the available resources for conducting research on the history of UMBC's origins, people, departments, and traditions.

Overview

The Retriever Weekly is the student newspaper for the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). The premier issue was published for students and staff on September 19, 1966, during the first semester of classes. Then titled UMBC News, our newspaper began the tradition of reporting student and campus life as UMBC continued to grow. The Retriever Weekly has served as a key community resource throughout UMBC's history and the historical volumes continue to be valuable documents for campus historians and alumni.

Our recent digital holdings begin in 2002 and are complete to the present with new issues added every week. The English department, The Retriever Weekly, and Special Collections are partnering to digitize the complete run of our newspaper and as these issues are scanned they will be added to this website; in Summer 2011 we made available issues from 1966-1981. Special Collections maintains the archives of print copies of The Retriever Weekly. If you would like to view an issue not yet digitized, please visit Special Collections.

Other news sources

The University Archives holds the newspaper clippings files originally collected by Institutional Advancement. They are in the Institutional Advancement records.

Researchers may also be interested in searching area newspapers for information such as the external or public perspective or to locate dates of events. UMBC maintains the Baltimore Sun archives; additional information is available  here: https://library.umbc.edu/specialcollections/collections/baltimore-sun-archives/

Other local newspapers include the Baltimore News American, the Baltimore Afro-American, The Daily Record, the Baltimore Jewish Times, and City Paper.

Historical footage and records from local television station WMAR-TV are held at the University of Baltimore Special Collections.