Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut

Category: Images

Trinity Library Now Part of JStor’s new Open Community Collections!

Driver Training, Hartford, 1957

Trinity Library is excited to  partner with JStor and a select few institutions in an  initiative for sharing local digitized collections. The new JStor Open Community Collections platform now hosts a growing number of Trinity College digitized image and text collections sourced from Trinity College Archives and Libraries.  Totaling over 20,000 items and spanning more than a century, it includes Ivy yearbooks, Tripod newspapers, archival photos, postcards, playbills, prints, manuscripts, and more. The collections which are public may be accessed directly on our Trinity College portal in JStor, but Trinity users may choose to authenticate for access also to other JStor content. Searches of our collections can be conducted from the Trinity portal or from the JStor database, with search capabilities to expand in future.

Browse more Open Community Collections or read the JStor blog post celebrating 350 collections and highlighting among them our Watkinson Library’s Book of Hours and British Theater Playbills collections.

Carnival, Trinidad: Young Girls in Costume, ca. 1998.

Tripod Jan.31, 1930.

 

 

Trinidad Carnival Images from Trinity’s Trinidad Global Learning Program!

Photo by Jeffrey Chock for Trinity in Trinidad Global Learning Site

Nearly 400 photographic slides of Trinidad Carnival dating from about 1998 were produced in association with the Trinity College in Trinidad Global Learning Site.  These have been digitized and published online by our Digital Collections and Services staff and are publicly available to view as the Trinidad Carnival Images collection in our licensed Artstor image repository.  The images document Carnival activities, participants, and many traditional characters and costumes.   https://library.artstor.org/#/collection/10003682. Continue reading

Digital Collections & Services Projects Update

The student staff working for Digital Collections & Services has been busy this semester completing two projects: the George Watson Cole Postcard collection, and the Trinity College Bulletins, housed in Watkinson. Students have digitized hundreds of postcards this semester, with just a few hundred remaining which will complete Trinity’s digital collection of Cole’s 10,000 postcards. The postcards already digitized and cataloged are available for view in Shared Shelf Commons and Artstor. George Watson Cole was a librarian and bibliographer, friend and contemporary of famous librarians Melvil Dewey and Charles Cutter, who traveled through France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, and England in the early 1900s and collected every postcard he could find. As a result, Trinity houses one half of his 20,000 postcards, primarily depicting pre-WWI Europe and some of California. These postcards show a slice of life: people, towns, maps, and churches as they appeared at the turn of the century and before two world wars devastated Europe.

The Trinity College Bulletins are also nearly complete, with a few volumes left from the 1940s and 50s, on which the students are currently working. During Fall 2017, the students completed digitization of Bulletins from the early 1990s to 2010.

The Bulletins include annual reports of the College President, Treasurer, and Librarian, the yearly library catalog and curriculum, necrology lists, faculty publications, photographs, summer school and graduate school information, among other booklets. The digitized bulletins stem from 1829 and are available to view on the Digital Repository. To get to the digital repository, visit the college library catalog –> Digital Collections –> Digital Repository –> College history, archives, and publications.

A biography of James Williams (1790 – 1878), who served as janitor to Trinity College for over 50 years, is also now available in the Digital Repository.

Photographs from the Collection of the Gilman Paper Company

Italian Family Seeking Lost Luggage, Ellis Island, 1905, Lewis W. Hine

Sometimes described as the “Gutenberg Bible” of photographic printing, Photographs from the Collection of the Gilman Paper Company #1173 reproduces 200 photos from the highly regarded collection of the same name acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2005.  Illustrating the history of photography, the photogravure images were hand-printed by Richard Benson, Dean of the Yale School of Art, and range from 1800s daguerreotypes to 20th Century photos by Robert Frank and Diane Arbus.  Trinity College’s Raether Library is fortunate to have been chosen to receive this volume from Nathaniel Gibbons, photographic artist and friend of Richard Benson, and supporter of Yale University Art Gallery’s program to share remaining copies with select educational and cultural institutions.

It is the hope of Mr. Gibbons that our volume will be appreciated for its collection of photos, but also as an example of fine printing and bookbinding, and that it will prove to be a valuable resource for Trinity College students.  The book will be housed within our Watkinson Library, and will be accessible to Trinity faculty and students as well as interested outside users.

Connecticut Connections: Historical College Scrapbooks from Connecticut College, Trinity College, and Wesleyan University

Over the past year, the CTW Digital Projects Group, which encompasses staff from Connecticut College, Trinity College, and Wesleyan University, came together to consider how the three schools might collaborate on digitizing and publishing archival or other materials owned by each school.

For its pilot project, the group selected student-made scrapbooks from multiple eras: those of Linda Abel, a student at Connecticut College from 1965-1969, Lynn Smith Miller, a student at Wesleyan from 1910-1914, and Phillip DeWitt Phair, who attended Trinity College from 1890 – 1894. The scrapbooks offer a glimpse into college student life during these periods through ephemera such as playbills and athletic event tickets, dance and social cards, artwork, valentines, invitations and letters, newspaper clippings, menus, and miscellaneous objects.

Utilizing the University of Southern California’s open-source platform, Scalar, members of the group scanned and uploaded an image of each scrapbook page, jointly decided on metadata fields, and added metadata and descriptions for each page, as well as a biography and introduction to each scrapbook.

“Connecticut Connections” was recently presented at the CTW Retreat in downtown Hartford and is publicly available online at: http://scalar.usc.edu/works/ctwscrapbooks. 

Deer Jumping a Fence: March 12, 1908, Canaan, CT.

The Enders Ornithology Lantern Slides Collection comprises over 800 hand-tinted glass plate photographs, produced by Herbert Keightley Job from 1896 to 1925. Job was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1864 and was a minister, lecturer, author, ornithologist, and pioneer wildlife photographer.

Job’s slides are digitized and make up part of the Ostrom and Alice Talcott Enders Ornithology Collection, a comprehensive collection of over 5,000 items including books, original artwork, periodicals, and more in the Watkinson Library.

While many of Job’s slides are of birds, he photographed this deer in Canaan, CT jumping over a fence on March 12, 1908! Other slides include scenes of everyday life as well as architecture, landscapes, and animals, some of which were taken throughout Connecticut. What you find may surprise you!

Visit the Digital Collections page and select “Enders Ornithology Lantern Slides” under “Image Collections in Shared Shelf Commons” to view the collection. Learn about lantern slides here.

8700 Trinity images now published to Digital Public Library of America!

Supported by The Mellon Foundation and others, Digital Public Library of America provides scholars and the general public with access to 18 million items from cultural heritage institutions.  Trinity contributions from Watkinson Library and Trinity Archives collections include ornithology lantern slides, early British theater playbills, George Watson Cole pre-WWI postcards, Renaissance manuscript illuminations, and Trinity College “old campus” photos. They can be located in “DPLA” by searching “trinity college” or by more focused searching. The collections can also still be accessed from our library Digital Collections page. Within the Cole postcard collection are 325 views of 1907-1914 California, including this one titled “Greetings from Venice California. On the Road of a Thousand Wonders.: Daily Scene on the Salt Water Canals,” by Souvenir Publishing Co. It shows one of the man-made canals built in 1905  to bring the feel of Venice, Italy, to southern California.