The Department of Prints, Photographs and Architectural Collections in the Patricia D. Klingenstein Library is home to one of the largest cased image collections in the country, consisting largely of daguerreotype, ambrotype or tintype portraits. Cased images typically include the image plate and a cover glass wrapped together in a brass mat, placed inside a…

August 26th is National Dog Day! What better way to celebrate than by sharing a unique,  dog-centric artifact from our library.   This daguerreotype of an unidentified dog (PR-012-2-263)  has the formality of a portrait. The animal’s pose and eye contact with the camera (and us as viewers) personifies it. One of our ongoing preservation projects includes rehousing…

This post was written by Sara Belasco, Enhanced Conservation Work Experience conservation assistant. For the last six months, I have been working on rehousing a collection of cased images in the Library collection. Almost all of these photographs are ambrotypes, one of the earliest photographic processes on glass plates popular in the 1850s. The collection was previously…