UMBC is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. Though the university is still fairly young, our community is diverse and growing. You can find members of our almost 70,000 alumni all over the world, and every one of them has a UMBC story to tell.
So UMBC has created a new digital space called Retriever Stories. It is the place for alumni and others in the UMBC community to tell those stories. You can also use the website to share photos (past or present), and to reconnect with fellow Retrievers. Remind us who you were back then, or tell us where you are right now. Share your vision of where UMBC should go in its next 50 years.
A New Way to Tell Our UMBC Story
No matter when you attended UMBC, you’ll find something to explore on the new website that will speak to your time at the university.
Stories are tagged by decade, year, and subject matter for easy searching. Staffers at the Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery have digitized hundreds of old photos for you to search. They have also made the entire archives of The Retriever Weekly available. Find yourself in those photos and pages and post stories about them.
Retriever Stories is a 100% UMBC product. It was accomplished entirely in-house through a collaboration of UMBC’s award-winning Imaging Research Center (IRC), the university’s Department of Information Technology, and the Office of Institutional Advancement. UMBC students even wrote the code for the website.
A Sharing Network
From the earliest planning for Retriever Stories, we’ve included feedback from alumni and the university community in the design and execution of the website. One thing we heard was that no one needs another social network. That’s why Retriever Stories is accessible from a wide range of popular social networks: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+. If you work or study at UMBC now, just use your myUMBC account.
The Retriever Stories team made a short video to show you how it works:
Log in, look around, and tell us your story. Your story is our story. The UMBC story.
Image: Sharing a memory on Retriever Stories. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.
