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The University of Maine maintains a wide variety of special educational and research facilities and supports many special educational, research, and public service programs. A few of these that are of most direct interest to undergraduate students are described below.
The Raymond H. Fogler Library is in the top 5% of college and university libraries in New England. It contains an excellent collection of general materials to support undergraduate studies, as well as rich and varied research collections. Fogler Library houses over a million volumes, 1.4 million microforms, over 2 million government documents, and maintains thousands of periodical subscriptions. Mariner is an information gateway to electronic resources which provides access to the holdings of all libraries in the University of Maine System, as well as to a collection of local and remote electronic indexes, abstracts and databases. The Fogler Library is a U.S. Patent and Trademarks Depository Library and the archive for the William S. Cohen papers. Other specialized collections include Canadiana, Maine-related materials, sound recordings and music scores, and historical manuscripts and maps.
The University of Maine Museum of Art, located in Bangor, houses a permanent collection exceeding 5700 works of art, 20% of which are accessible in public spaces throughout the University campus in Orono. Highlights of the early collection included works, primarily on paper, by John James Audubon, Marc Chagall, Francisco Goya, Childe Hassam, Edward Hopper, Kathe Kollwitz, Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, and James M. Whistler. More recent acquisitions include works by artists such as Ralph Blakelock, Georges Braque, Mary Cassatt, Honore Daumier, George Inness, Diego Rivera, Pablo Picasso, and Giovanni Battista Piranesi. The Robert Venn Carr ‘38 Collection is comprised of 285 pieces, and includes works on paper by many contemporary masters including Max Beckmann, Jim Dine, Roy Lichtenstein, and Robert Rauschenberg.
The Museum’s permanent collection also celebrates the long heritage of Maine art and artists. Included in the collection are examples by Maine artists such as Berenice Abbott, Marsden Hartley, Winslow Homer, John Marin, Carl Sprinchorn, and Andrew Wyeth.
The department of Art Gallery, to be located in Lord Hall (Fall 2005) on the Orono campus, displays traveling exhibits as well as work by UMaine students and members of the faculty.
The Hudson Museum is located in the Maine Center for the Arts on the UMaine campus. Hudson Museum exhibits and programs explore anthropology as the study of humans and their reliance on culture. The museum’s collections and exhibits function as educational and research aids for University faculty, students and the general public. The permanent collections include one of the finest assemblages of Prehispanic Mexican and Central American materials in the United States. The collections also include materials from the Native American cultures of the Northwest Coast, the Plains, the Southwest, local Penobscot, South America and the Arctic, as well as artifacts from Oceania, Asia and Africa. The Hudson Museum offers permanent, temporary and outreach exhibits, teacher workshops, lectures and children’s programs.
The Page Farm and Home Museum documents the history of Maine from 1865 to 1940 through a collection of farm machinery and household items from that period. The museum building itself is a part of Maine agricultural history. The large, post-and-beam barn is the last of the original agricultural buildings dating from the founding of the University of Maine in 1865. Careful renovations display the collection over its three floors while preserving much of the building’s original character.
The Hutchins Concert Hall in the Maine Center for the Arts presents a full spectrum of performances ranging from classical music to bluegrass, from avant-garde dance to Broadway musicals, jazz to folk and ethnic music, comedy to family entertainment, country to rock and much more. Isaac Stem and Yo-Yo Ma, The Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Arlo Guthrie, Jean Redpath, The Royal Winnipeg Ballet, The Peking Acrobats, Marcel Marceau, Leontyne Price, Rudolf Nureyev, Johnny Winter, Greg Allman, The Modern Jazz Quartet, Peter, Paul and Mary, Jerry Seinfeld, Dana Carvey, Dennis Miller, Kris Kristofferson, Lee Greenwood, Bob Dylan, and Dave Matthews are some of the artists who have appeared there.
This 280-seat facility is primarily the site for faculty and student recitals, vocal and instrumental ensembles, concerts, and a few Maine Center for the Arts performances. Various dance and theatre productions are also presented. A state-of-the-art recording studio that supports a course in recording arts is a part of the Minsky Hall facility.
The Darling Marine Center is the marine laboratory and field station of the University of Maine. Located on the Maine coast just 100 miles south of Orono, the 170 acre campus is situated near a wide variety of marine habitats including rocky coast, sandy beaches, marshland, and mudflats. The center campus is composed of 23 buildings totaling nearly 100,000 sq. ft. including classrooms, laboratories, faculty and graduate student offices, a marine library, a dining hall, a residence hall, a SCUBA diving support facility, and a Flowing Seawater Laboratory designed for culturing live marine organisms. The Center includes a wide variety of modern research instrumentation, and it has a modern fleet of vessels for educational and research purposes. Internships are available for undergraduates enabling them to conduct research at the Center during the summer months. The School of Marine Sciences offers a unique Semester-by-the-Sea program for undergraduate marine science majors in which students live and study at the Center during a fall semester.
The Maynard F. Jordan Planetarium is a resource for students and the public. It conducts labs for courses in astronomy, and presents public programs. The Planetarium, a domed theater where visitors can look up to see an exact simulation of the night sky produced by a Spitz Systems Nova planetarium projector, offers sky programs for visitors of all ages throughout the school year. It offers a series of general admission showings on weekends (free to UMaine students) and special, private group events.
The Jordan Observatory, a small, domed building next to the Memorial Union, houses an eight-inch Alvan Clark refractor telescope and several smaller instruments that students can use to view many of the wonders in the sky. Astronomy students use the facility for studies on weeknights, and student volunteers operate it on weekends for the general public.
Founded in 1967, the Canadian-American Center is one of the leading institutes for studying Canada in the United States, and is a National Resource Center on Canada designated so by the U.S. Department of Education in 1979. The Center coordinates an extensive program of undergraduate and graduate education; contributes to the continued development of Fogler Library as a major research library on Canada; promotes cross-border research in the humanities, social science, natural sciences, and professions; publishes Canadian-American Public Policy, a referred series of occasional papers focusing on contemporary issues in U.S.-Canada relations; operates Canadian-American Center Cartography; and directs outreach programs to state, regional and national audiences which include Canada Week, the Atlantic Canada Teachers Institute, and the Atlantic Canada Faculty Institute.
The Maine Folklife Center (MFC) houses the nationally distinguished Northeast Archives of Folklore and Oral History. This collection of several thousand tape recordings of oral histories and musical performances, plus thousands of photographs, documents such subjects as the traditions of the Maine lumberwoods and river drives, women’s folklife, coastal and maritime occupations, and textile folk arts and artists. MFC publishes the scholarly monograph series Northeast Folklore and the semi annual newsletter, Maine Folklife.
The Center for Community Inclusion coordinates the undergraduate and graduate Interdisciplinary curricula in Disability Studies. The Center administers several education, research and public service projects focusing on improving the quality of life for persons with disabilities and their families. Students who elect the interdisciplinary curriculum in Disability Studies may become involved in these projects through practica and internships.
The Albert D. Conley Speech and Hearing Center, located in Dunn Hall on the University of Maine campus, serves as the primary clinical demonstration and teaching site for undergraduate and graduate students in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders. At the Center, faculty and graduate students provide speech, language, and audiological services to the University community and residents in the surrounding communities. UM students and their immediate family members are eligible for services at no cost during the academic year.
The Women’s Resource Center promotes and maintains an inclusive, positive and supportive climate conducive to women’s personal and professional development at the University of Maine. It provides linkage with women and women’s organizations throughout the state. The Center serves as a resource for individuals and organizations, offering information and referrals for women’s programs and services on and off campus, providing advocacy and collaboration to help women with special needs and concerns, and bringing together women with similar values and goals.
The Women’s Resource Center promotes a closer relationship between the women on the University of Maine campus and women in the larger Maine community, reaching out to women’s programs and initiatives and providing support and guidance, including mentoring opportunities with women activists and gender equity programs for girls in area high schools. In addition to an extensive collection of books, periodicals, and videos of interest to women, the Center offers programs, provides meeting space, produces and distributes a calendar of events by and about women and promotes within the university community a broader understanding of the diverse experiences of all women. |
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