WM Yearbooks Now Digitally Archived

By Amber Lester Kennedy Wednesday, October 20, 2010

 

With a click of the mouse, net surfers can now travel back in time to see Williamsburg before it became a tourist destination or the college when women joined the campus.

Starting this week, users can peruse 96 years of history in the Colonial Echo Digital Archive, an online database containing each of the College of William and Mary’s yearbooks from 1899 to 1995. The yearbooks have been scanned in full color from cover to cover and are available, for free, here. The launch of the digital archive of the yearbook collection, long housed in the Earl Gregg Swem Library, will be celebrated with a reception during Homecoming this weekend, from 4 to 5 p.m. Friday in the library.

Digitizing the yearbooks has long been on the library’s “wish list,” according to Amy Schindler, university archivist and acting Marian and Alan McLeod Director of the Special Collections Research Center. “We just thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to make these available?’ because they’re used all the time,” she said. “Alumni are interested, but they’re also used by university offices and other researchers.”

When the library initially investigated the cost, it was too expensive, but the library was able to digitize through the support of funds established by School of Education Professor Emeritus Armand Galfo and his wife, Mary, and history Professor Emeritus Richard Sherman and his wife, Hanni. The library was able to negotiate a reduced rate through the LYRASIS Mass Digitization Collaborative with funding from LYRASIS member libraries and the Sloan Foundation. Schindler said the cost was 10 cents per page for about 30,000 pages; their initial quote would have cost more to digitize one or two yearbooks.

The entire process, from paperwork to sending the yearbooks to a scanning facility, took two months. The librarians were excited to see the yearbook volumes go up on their site as they were scanned; “We could see our volumes being born digitally,” Schindler said.

Yearbooks between 1995 and 2010 are still sold through the Colonial Echo organization, and might be archived when more funds become available, Schindler said. In the future, the yearbook will share its digital files for archiving with the library.

 

The yearbooks offer more than a glimpse at geeky haircuts. They offer a picture of the culture of college in Williamsburg and how it has or hasn’t changed. Associate Professor Arthur Knight, who oversees the Williamsburg Documentary Project, said in a press release that “college yearbooks provide terrific information about the changing culture, social mores, fashion and major events at one of our nation’s most important institutions, its universities.” He called the Colonial Echo a treasure trove.

 

Sherman spent days in the Swem library reading the first 50 yearbooks when he co-authored a history of the college in 1993. He said looking at old yearbooks, “you get a little reminder of what issues were bothering students.” He said the digitization will be more convenient for anyone doing research about the college, their family members or the city.

Schindler said her favorite yearbook is from 1918, when the college went co-ed, but she’s also partial to pictures of famous alumni before they were well-known, such as Glenn Close, Jon Stewart and comedian Patton Oswalt. “I found a picture of him in his off-campus apartment, sitting at a kitchen table eating cold spaghetti and he hasn’t aged a bit,” she said.

At the reception on Friday, extra copies of Colonial Echoes will be given away to alumni who might have lost their copies. Computers will also be set up to allow visitors to search the digital archive.