  Seven years ago, with the encouragement of the NSF and AURA, NOAO requested
proposals from the community to partner with the national observatory to
improve instrumentation and/or telescope capabilities at KPNO and CTIO. Of the
proposals that were selected, one came from the University of Maryland with the
goals of helping NOAO complete the development, construction, and deployment of
a new, wide-field, near-IR imager (NEWFIRM) and of working with NOAO to develop
data reduction pipelines and data archiving capabilities at NOAO. By all
measures, the Maryland-NOAO instrument partnership has been a resounding
success. In this article, we briefly describe the positive impact this
partnership has had on Maryland, NOAO, and the astronomical community.
