Blasts from the Past – Utica yearbook Collection goes digital

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Blasts from the Past – Utica yearbook Collection goes digital

Copies of the Utica College 1951, 1972 and 1993 yearbooks stacked atop each other on a desk.

Initiative puts eight decades of memories at your fingertips

Sepia-toned photos of Utica College classes and people circa 1951.

No need to master the laws of space-time or the mechanics of temporal distortion to travel to the past – at least not the past of the Utica University community. A new initiative undertaken by the Frank E. Gannett Memorial Library has made traveling through the institution’s 80 year history easier than ever.

Eight decades of yearbooks, from Utica College of Syracuse University to Utica College to Utica University, have all been scanned, digitized, and cataloged into a searchable online database.

The library applied for and was selected for one of The Central New York Library Resources Council’s (CLRC) digitization grants, selecting their collection of yearbooks frequently used by alumni and families, for the digitization process.

“Often the descendants of alumni will be working on genealogy projects, or are just curious about their ancestors' college days,” says Reference Librarian Archivist Janis Winn. “But for those who don't live nearby, browsing the yearbooks wasn't possible -- up until now.”

All 67 volumes of yearbooks were shipped from the library to an independent digitization laboratory in New Jersey, which had bid on and won the job. Having several copies of each yearbook volume allowed the library to provide a full set that could be have their spines removed for faster scanning via an automated document feeder and which didn’t need to be shipped back to the library, making for a lower price, while still maintaining a full physical collection back at the library.

The scanning and metadata (information like names, descriptions, dates, etc.) were completed by the digital laboratory over the course of three weeks. The CLRC then made the files publicly available on the New York Heritage Project website, a process that took another three weeks.

“Up until now, the yearbooks weren't indexed, meaning they weren't searchable by name or keyword, so a lot of page-flipping and visual skimming was involved in finding a particular alumnus' photo, for example,” Winn says. “This digitization project, in addition to making the yearbooks more accessible to remote alumni and researchers, has also made them more accessible to our own librarians, as well as local reasearchers.”

Alumni can visit the university archives website at utica.libguides.com/collegearchives and follow the link to the yearbook collection on the New York Heritage Project website. They can then either browse by year (by clicking on the cover image of each yearbook) or enter search words in the box at the top of the screen. All images and text may be downloaded from the site. And, as always, our librarians are available to help with your search as well.

“A fun thing that might be of interest to current students is to search the collection for early photos of their faculty members!”