Collins Unbound

The best part about working in the Archives & Special Collections?  Stumbling across something you did not expect to find.

This past year, Maya Steinborn ’14, Zeb Howell ’16, and Morgan Ford ’17, have chronicled the materials they found interesting and exciting while working in the Archives & Special Collections.  A BIG thank you to each of them for their contributions!

Most often an archival collection arrives at our door in complete disarray, a pile of boxes with folders, objects, books, and even some Q-tips thrown in.  There is no order and little identification.  We go through these boxes making sense of the madness so that researchers might spend less time digging through boxes and more time studying the material that is actually relevant to their research.  In the past six years I have come across quite a few unexpected discoveries while digging through boxes: copious amounts of hair, a sombrero, a powder horn, letters signed by U.S. Presidents and Civil War generals, and most recently an issue of the Ulster County Gazette, January 4, 1800.

This item emerged from the papers of Walter S. Davis (1866-1943), a professor of history and political science from 1907-1943.  I was quite excited to find this issue; it is the first paper to report the death of George Washington!  Then I began to do some research, it turns out this issue of the Ulster County Gazette was widely reproduced as a historical souvenir.  In fact, only two originals are known to exist, one at the Library of Congress and the other at the American Antiquarian Society.

Stop by the Archives & Special Collections to see this exciting reproduction of the Ulster County Gazette and learn how to distinguish the originals from the fakes!

The Archives & Special Collections is pleased to welcome its third summer research fellow, Kara Flynn ’15!  Kara, a double major in English and Sociology and Anthropology, will serve as Wikipedian in Residence.  Kara’s work will focus on increasing access to and awareness of the rare and unique material in the Archives & Special Collections through Wikipedia.  In addition, Kara will arrange and describe an archival collection, organize a Wikipedia event (for Fall 2014), and record her progress on our blog or Tumblr.  Stay tuned for Kara’s first post on May 22^nd!

I bet you didn’t know that the Archives & Special Collections has several boxes of what are known as “glass plate negatives.” These are literally photo negatives on pieces of glass, and they are extremely delicate (being thin glass). Most of the small black and white photos along the wall of librarians’ offices in the Information Commons are actually prints of these negatives, so if you’d like a good example, that’s the place to look.

Instead of being the stark black and white negatives on plastic that we’re more prone to think of now, this 19th-20^th century technique created plates with less definitive contrast, resulting in dark grey-versus-light gray areas. However a glass negative was still preferable to paper, as paper resulted in “unsatisfactory” results due to paper grain and fuzziness. A glass plate negative was typically done using a “wet” method, where the glass would be coated in a photo-sensitive substance and immediately sensitized, exposed and developed before it could dry, which took anywhere from five to fifteen minutes. Most of the negatives we have boxed up are more than likely “dry plates, “ though, since the University was established in 1888, and “wet plates” quickly went out of style in 1880, after the dry plate came into existence.

Another “problem” with glass plate photography was size – enlargement was impractical in the 1800s, so any created negative would need to be in the desired size of the final print. Can you imagine trying to carry around a 20×24 inch piece of glass or two without breaking it? No wonder photography was a big deal back then.

This glass-plate method was used up until about 1975, when the cellulose negative finally became popular. After that, of course, we moved onto digital photography, which doesn’t require a negative at all.

By Morgan Ford