Athletic Archive Collodion Photograph Intake: Handling Glass Negatives and Ambrotypes Before Digitization
School athletic archive collodion photograph intake is the pre-digitization assessment process that examines a suspected wet-collodion glass negative or ambrotype from a school athletic archive for the visual and physical characteristics associated with the collodion process, documents the condition of the glass support and image layer in their current housing, and determines how each object should be stored, documented, and routed before any scanning or further handling decision is made. When a school athletic archive holds glass-encased or loose photographic materials from the mid-to-late nineteenth century, some of those objects may be wet-collodion products: either glass negatives intended to be printed from, or ambrotypes — thin or underexposed collodion negatives on glass backed with dark material to read as positive images. Both formats share the characteristic that the image is formed in a collodion layer applied directly to a glass support, a combination that is fragile in specific ways and that requires condition documentation before any digitization or handling plan is finalized.
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