Special Collections recently had an exhibit at the Franco-American Centre on campus honoring Rudy Vallée, who popularized the Maine Stein Song. Hubert Prior Vallée grew up in Westbrook, Maine and attended the University of Maine as a member of the Class of 1925, before enjoying an illustrious career in show business. The Centre’s “rassemblement” or […]

As noted in UMaine News, Michael Socolow, associate professor at the Department of Communications and Journalism, presented on April 29 at the 2023 Radio Preservation Task Force conference in Washington, D.C.  He spent several days in Special Collections accessing the Floyd Gibbons Papers while preparing for the talk. Socolow, who was a member of the […]

Each year Fogler Library’s Special Collections Department hosts numerous class and student group researchers. Our most recent visit was from the All Maine Women honors society who make an annual trip to us to look at records from their group’s 100 years of history. The online All Maine Women records finding aid provides detailed information […]

Happy finals week! For those looking for some extra Black Bear spirit to get them through finals week we recommend visiting a Special Collections exhibit on the Stein Song on the first floor of Fogler on the Center Hallway on Level 1. The exhibit features a video of students singing the Stein Song from circa […]

Ahead of the rededication of Beryl Warner Williams Hall, Special Collections was honored to welcome members of Beryl’s family to look at records we have on her time at UMaine as an undergraduate (Class of 1935), graduate (1940), and from when she received an honorary degree in 1972. Our colleagues at Bangor Public Library also […]

Fogler Library Special Collections is excited to be a stop the Scavenger Hunt for the Maine National History Day competition, an event for students in grades 6-12 co-organized by the Margaret Chase Smith Library and the University of Maine Department of History. For the first time in four years, the state contest will be meeting […]

The Northeast Archives of Folklore and Oral History collection MF162, Immigrants and Identity, is now available online. In 2005, the Maine Folklife Center and the Hudson Museum at the University of Maine studied and presented ways that immigrants in central and eastern Maine connected themselves with their ethnicity. These fifteen interviews were conducted from February […]

The University of Maine has announced that conservationist and author Ken Olson has donated his professional papers to Fogler Library’s Special Collections Department, complementing materials held at the state’s largest library relating to the environment, resource conservation and policy in Maine and elsewhere. W. Kent Olson retired in 2006 from a three-decade conservation career that […]

In 1841, nearly 500 female factory workers walked out of Saco’s York Manufacturing Company and paraded up Main Street, chanting and singing. They gathered in a local church, formed a committee, and sent the factory owner a document articulating their complaints about wages, housing, and paternalistic rules. After a few days of fruitless negotiations with the […]

Several Fogler Library resources provide information on Maine’s newest federal conservation area, Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument, established August 24, 2016.  These items are currently on display near the north entrance of Fogler Library’s first floor. While several of these resources trace the controversy surrounding the establishment and management of the monument, others emphasize […]