At the end of each year, the students of Massachusetts Agricultural College and its successor institutions issued a yearbook known as the Index, documenting their time at school. For most of the first half century of the school, the Index was compiled by members of the junior class and contained “communications” from each class along with complete lists of students and student organizations, faculty, and officers of the college, along with occasionally humorous (and occasionally-humorous) vignettes of life on campus. The Index was only one of a trio of books that students kept during the nineteenth century to remember their times of campus, along with “M Books” (personalized scrapbooks) and class-issued photographic albums containing images of classmates, faculty, and campus.
In its earliest years, the Index had few illustrations. Before 1882, each number contained only a handful of comic drawings or line drawings of scenes on campus, and for several years after that date, the volumes were issued with only a single photographic frontispiece. By the turn of the century, however, photographs began to proliferate in the Index (eventually replacing the class photograph albums altogether). Beginning with images of the faculty, class portraits, and images of sports teams and campus views, the yearbook expanded by 1912 to include photographs of each member of the junior class, and eventually, the senior class as well. The Index ceased publication in 2005.
In 2010, SCUA digitized an entire set of yearbooks as part of the Library's partnership with the Open Content Alliance and Internet Archive. Because the volumes listed below are organized by year of publication, and because the early Index was issued by the junior class, the yearbook for 1880 (for example) reflects the class of 1881. In 1934, a decision was made to feature the senior class rather than the junior class, resulting in two issues of the Index dated 1934, here numbered 1934a and 1934b respectively.
The Shorthorn (continued by Stosag, 1958-2002) was a yearbook of Stockbridge School of Agriculture, Massachusetts Agricultural College (and Massachusetts State College and UMass Amherst). Digital files are hosted on the Internet Archive.