Vassar College Digitizes Glass Plate Negative Collection

Vassar College has a new digitized collection of glass plate negatives. “Although class trees and the events around them don’t have much presence on campus now, it was a big deal 85 years ago, involv­ing dove-releasing, secret rites and digging the hole using Matthew Vas­sar’s silver spade. The tree ceremo­nies were documented by a series of images dating from 1904 to 1935. This series of visual materials can be found in the ‘Glass Plates Neg­atives’ collection at Vassar’s digital library. With 870 images in total, the collection was recently conserved and digitized at an off-campus con­servation center.”