A Peek Inside ... The Archives Offices

Behind locked doors on the second floor of Hornbake Library, long-lost pieces of University of Maryland history are being uncovered, piece by piece. On a bright-red cart sit reels of football footage from the 1970s. Boxes full of donated, handwritten papers and keepsakes stacked on a table wait to be sorted. Entomology department records on the shelves hold clues about the earliest Black workers in College Park. 

It's a huge undertaking to bring that material to light, but one that staff, including University Archivist Natalie Trapuzzano and Mouhanad Al Rifay ’14, business coordinator for Belonging and Community, eagerly do. 

“In a nutshell, my job is to collect, preserve and tell the story of the University of Maryland,” said Trapuzzano, who has worked at UMD for three years. 

She juggles requests from alums about grandparents, documentarians on Terp sports pioneers and professors on the history of trash and recycling on campus. The university’s collection of athletics memorabilia, presidential records and Greek life are particularly robust, but “I think there’s a lot missing,” she says, especially from minoritized groups. “Either they weren’t being thought of to be collected from, or they didn’t feel safe to give their stuff up.” 

Today, she and her team try to attend a wide variety of student events, from sit-ins to SGA meetings to zine-making workshops, urging groups to donate their records, including “born-digital” materials on a Google Drive or social media. 

Her work dovetails with that of Al Rifay. He worked on The 1856 Project, an initiative that examines UMD’s historic intersections with slavery, connections with local Black communities and contemporary Black experiences, for more than two years before taking on his new role over the summer.  

“Social justice really matters to me,” he said, “standing up for human rights, documenting atrocities. If you understand the human struggle, it’s all connected.” 

Take a look into their workspaces, separated by the stacks. 

“I’ve always been a little weird, attracted to spooky things,” said Trapuzzano, whose office perpetually feels like Halloween. She watched her first bloody horror film at 5 years old, walked through haunted houses by herself as a kid, and today is happily surrounded by all the pumpkins, severed hands and black cats that won’t fit in her house. Her mom painted the skull on her bookshelf, and the “Scream” mask is from an estate sale. She celebrates each Oct. 31 after a monthlong scary movie marathon; her favorites are “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me” and “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” the original. 

“Every positive change that has ever happened on this campus has happened because students got out and put their reputations and education and safety on the line to demand that the university get better,” she said. Trapuzzano oversees regular and pop-up exhibits in Hornbake, and she worked on “Rising Up,” which was on display during the 2023-24 school year and highlighted 100 years of student activism. Today, enlarged reprints of those photos dot her office. Her favorite image depicts President Wilson Elkins and members of the Black Student Union in 1969 as they laid out demands for higher admittance rates and financial support of Black students, increased numbers of Black faculty and staff, and a Black student center. 

An unassuming little table outside Trapuzzano’s office serves as a shared puzzle space where anyone can fill in a piece or two. It’s an outgrowth of the community puzzles she set out on her porch during the pandemic. With boxes piling up at her house, she decided to bring them into the office, and it’s become a hit over the past year. There’s even a “puzzle master” on the housekeeping staff. “Sometimes people will look up at me and say, ‘Don’t tell anyone I’ve been sitting here for an hour!’”   

The original flag of independent, post-Ottoman Syria from the 1940s, featuring green, white and black stripes with three red stars, was recently reinstated after the fall of the Assad regime, whose version had substituted red for green. Al Rifay fled Syria in 2005 as a 15-year-old with his mother, stepfather and sister; they were under threat from the dictatorship that had already killed other members of his family.

“This is the flag that represents me, not the one that oppressed me,” said Al Rifay, who has been giving these pins out since the revolution began in 2011 and protesting from afar for independence. Now, he’s looking forward to his first trip back to his homeland in 20 years. “It means a lot. This is what my family fought for.”  

Not all materials donated to the Archives make sense for its collection and are designated “out of scope.” That includes several of the items Al Rifay has on the bookshelf behind his desk: two traditionally dressed Korean dolls, a turtle-shaped trivet and an official state poster from 1990, the year he was born, featuring a blue heron. One piece he did acquire was a screen print from an Iranian artist who visited Studio A in the Stamp Student Union, featuring a woman making a rebellious gesture with the words “woman, life, freedom” on the side. “It reminds me of the struggle for freedom in that region,” he said, “and how it reflects here on campus.” 

The collection captures many facets of Al Rifay’s life: “First Gen,” pronouns and rainbows, Chicago style for research papers, historic Testudo images, a yellow logo commemorating the victims of the Syrian chemical attacks, “nerd” and more. One of his favorites is a quote: “You have something in this world. So, stand for it.” 

This is part of an occasional series offering a look inside some of the most interesting faculty and staff offices around campus. Think you have a cool workspace—or know someone’s that you’d like to recommend? Email kshih@umd.edu.