Check It Out

Hornbake Library is home to the National Trust for Historic Preservation Library Collection, which includes the nation's largest set of books and magazines devoted to the theory and practice of preservation. Reference specialists can help sort through images, including 18,500 postcards depicting buildings and sites from 1903 to 1914, obscure newsletters that may prove useful in restoring your old home, and organizational and personal papers from leading preservationists. Highlights include collections from Preservation Maryland, the state's leading advocacy group, and Margot Gayle, champion of New York's Victorian cast-iron buildings.

Link to the Past

The Center for Heritage Resource Studies hosts lectures and conferences that help communities define and protect their unique pasts. Watch for events on campus or at outreach sites including Annapolis, Baltimore's Hampden neighborhood or New Philadelphia in Illinois, the first town founded and registered by an African American in the antebellum United States. Maryland experts who have preserved such landmarks also connect you-via a thorough online directory-to preservation agencies and organizations that may help get your project off the ground.

Treasure Language

With the help of Maryland professors and students, the new National Museum of Language traces the way people preserve and share information. The Department of Anthropology's Janet Chernela is a curator of the first exhibit, "Writing Language: Passing It On." She and her students provided materials for the museum-located just south of the university on Route 1-highlighting Sumerian, Phoenician, Hebrew, Greek, Latin and Arabic languages. Maryland students also serve as docents and created online supplemental materials.

Get Into the Field

Permanent exhibits at Reynolds Tavern and the Governor Calvert House in Annapolis highlight nearly 30 years of archaeology work in the state capital by university researchers. A third Annapolis exhibit at the Jonas Green House and Print Shop is available for viewing by reservation. Elsewhere this fall, you can monitor a work in progress closer to College Park. A site curator will welcome volunteers to help dig or process artifacts from Riversdale Plantation, home of the university's founder.