A Fearless University Needs a Fearless Library

LIBRARIES ADVANCE OPEN ACCESS TO KNOWLEDGE

At the heart of the Libraries’ work is a simple but increasingly urgent principle: Knowledge should be accessible.

That belief carries enormous implications in today’s information and research landscape. The cost of scholarly publishing continues to rise dramatically, placing growing pressure on research universities nationwide. At the same time, barriers to accessing trustworthy information limit who can participate in discovery, innovation, and public discourse.

This is precisely the kind of grand challenge that Forward calls us to address and reflects one of the defining ideas behind the campaign: that universities have a responsibility not only to generate knowledge but to share it in ways that create meaningful public impact.

The Libraries is pursuing that goal through a fundamental reimagining of how scholarly knowledge is owned, shared, and accessed. The Libraries’ support for open scholarship and sustainable publishing practices helps ensure that Maryland research reaches the broadest possible audience — not just scholars and students, but also policymakers, practitioners, and communities around the world. One of the most powerful manifestations of that work is the Equitable Access Policy, which makes discoveries generated at Maryland freely available to everyone. A university policy might sound boring or bureaucratic, but this policy greatly expands public access to UMD research by removing the price and permission barriers that lock out many of the people and communities who could most benefit from it.

“Research can only have an impact on those who can access it. Even with all of the advances we have made in digital information technology, we still exist in an age of knowledge inequity,” said Michelle Wilson, Libraries’ Head of Open Scholarship Services. “The Equitable Access Policy gives us a mechanism to make our faculty scholarship available throughout the world, but also to promote it here in Maryland where it can be used by clinicians, policy makers, community organizers, and educators.”

LIBRARIES CONNECT CAMPUS & COMMUNITY

In addition to making UMD research more accessible, campus and local communities are invited to engage with the Libraries in multiple ways. The Forward campaign’s vision for stronger communities is animated by interdisciplinary collaboration, a desire for broad impact, and a campus-wide commitment to uniting to do good on the UMD campus and beyond. At the Libraries, we leverage curiosity and connection to strengthen and empower communities here at Maryland and society-at-large.

As part of our commitment to community engagement and outreach, we provide public access to government documents, steward specialized collections that preserve the rich history of Maryland and the university, and offer educational programs that are open to all.

On the fourth floor of McKeldin Library, you’ll find one of the ways we serve the larger community — that’s where government documents are housed. For the past 100 years, the University of Maryland Libraries has served as a regional depository library under the U.S. Federal Depository Library (FDL) Program, which guarantees everyone has access to government information.

“At its heart, the Federal Depository Library Program is information for the people,” said Celina McDonald, UMD Libraries’ Government Information Librarian. “The original idea — to make sure information produced by the government was available to everyone — came from founding father Benjamin Franklin, and that’s exactly what the program does. As a regional depository library, the Libraries provides no-fee, public access to one of the nation’s largest collections of government documents, ensuring civic knowledge and governmental transparency are available to everyone.”

Along with our work as an FDL, we are one of only two Patent and Trademark Resource Centers in the state of Maryland and provide free public access to resources and training with real economic consequence for entrepreneurs, inventors, and small business owners across the region.

The Libraries also stewards the university’s most significant cultural and historical collections — preserving the stories that shape Maryland’s identity while creating opportunities for dialogue, reflection, and learning. Special collections unique to the University of Maryland invite researchers, scholars, and everyday individuals to engage with history via materials, records, and artifacts that can’t be found anywhere else.

The Libraries’ 1856 Project exemplifies the ways special collections can be used to promote connection with history and with each other. Part of Universities Studying Slavery, an international consortium, the project confronts the university’s historical ties to slavery and creates opportunities that foster reflection and deeper understanding. Through exhibitions, archival research, digitized collections, and public programming, the initiative engages students, faculty, alumni, and community members in truth-telling and memorialization. This year, the impact of this project will extend even further as the Libraries host the consortium’s conference. The free conference is open to the public and will bring together scholars and community members to explore the long and interconnected histories of American slavery and freedom and think deeply about America’s founding values: truth, liberty, and justice.

Beyond the Libraries’ collections, open-to-all educational programs offer individuals the chance to be challenged by new ideas or to learn a skill that can benefit them academically, professionally, or personally.

Our Research Education team, headed by librarian Lindsay Carpenter, creates events and programs that invite students, faculty, staff, and the local community into conversations that bridge disciplines and perspectives. At a STEAM Salon event, emerging researchers, faculty, and students present their work at the intersection of Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics. Last October, the Scholarship as Conversation event series hosted “Library of the Macabre: Researching Horror in Popular Culture,” which featured workshops, film screenings, and faculty talks that used the genre of horror as a jumping-off point to discuss and address the university’s Grand Challenges.

“For me, curiosity is the heart of higher education,” said Carpenter. “It’s the reason I love working in libraries. These events allow us to get curious — about our work, our colleagues’ work, and the world around us. With these events, we create spaces where people of all levels and areas of expertise, from our campus or our local community, can share their excitement and passion, build connections, and learn new things.”

These efforts are just some of the ways the Libraries’ work reflects another core theme of the Forward campaign: building stronger communities through creativity, civic engagement, and shared purpose.

LIBRARY TECHNOLOGY & SPACES SUPPORT STUDENT SUCCESS

Lastly, the Forward Campaign asks what it takes to prepare tomorrow’s trailblazers — to prepare UMD students who are joining and defining a rapidly evolving workforce. At the Libraries, part of that answer is aspiring to provide state-of-the-art spaces and technology that meet them where they are and prepare them for where they’re going.

The Libraries is reimagining how physical environments can foster creativity, collaboration, and well-being. In the Memory Lab, students digitize fragile VHS tapes, Super 8 film, and vinyl records — preserving personal histories and cultural artifacts that would otherwise disappear. The Podcasting Lab provides a launchpad for research-driven student podcasts like With Love & Struggle. This limited podcast series was created by a group of undergraduate students using archives from Hornbake Library and dives into the Libraries’ collection of the underground feminist magazine Off Our Backs (1970 – 2008). In the Makerspace, students create, experiment, and bring coursework to life, like using our AR Sandbox to recreate topographical maps. In quiet carrels and collaborative zones, they think, argue, draft, and discover.

But the vision extends further. One of the Libraries’ most ambitious priorities is the modernization of McKeldin Library to support experiential learning, hybrid collaboration, and interdisciplinary research at a new scale. Philanthropic investment in improvements to transform our physical spaces will create a more connected and dynamic campus and embody what a modern research library needs to be: a place where students, faculty, and researchers come together to explore ideas, test solutions, and exchange knowledge across disciplines.

The Libraries also play a critical role in preparing students for an information environment increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence, digital media, and complex questions of credibility and ethics.

The Libraries’ award-winning online learning module about AI literacy — integrated into more than 200 courses across campus and used by 90 universities across the globe — helps students learn how to navigate emerging technologies thoughtfully and responsibly. Librarians are helping students develop the critical thinking skills necessary to evaluate information, interpret data, and engage responsibly in civic and scholarly life. In that sense, the Libraries are not only preserving access to knowledge. They are helping define how future generations will understand and use it.