Written by Steven Chandler
“Through the library’s tireless efforts, what has been paper, cardboard and leather is now ones and zeros, available to anyone,” said Jeremy Beauchamp, Harding’s director of student publications.
A new project is underway that will allow everyone a chance to look at Harding’s past. Brackett Library is currently taking copies of every Petit Jean yearbook, digitizing them and putting them on the Internet.
Catherine Canterbury, graduate assistant for the Brackett Library, spends hours each day in the media center scanning yearbooks. Once the images are scanned into the computer, she crops them and organizes the pages into sections.
They are then placed on the Internet by Brenda Breezeel, systems administrator at the library. According to Canterbury, it takes about five hours to make one volume ready for the Internet.
“It’s been really neat to look at all of the history and all of the different pictures,” Canterbury said. “There are a lot of funny things and interesting things for sure to look at in all the yearbooks.”
Canterbury has completed the digitizing of about 30 volumes. She plans to get through most of the 1970s before she graduates in May.
“Catherine has made such great process, a lot faster than we ever even imagined,” Breezeel said. “Depending on if we can get another GA [graduate assistant] to help we might be able to finish it by the end of the summer … We were hoping for a one year [timeframe].”
The yearbooks are placed on the Internet in PDF format. This process allows for a unique feature known as Optical Character Recognition to be used. When a page is scanned it is stored as an image. OCR analyzes the scanned image for words, thus allowing the viewer to search for words throughout the entire yearbook. This will allow people to easily look through yearbooks for anything they want based on their search.
“The library has performed an excellent service for the university,” Beauchamp said. “I think it [digitizing the yearbooks] is a great resource for current students to see how the university has progressed and for alumni to relive the years that were.”
The process has uncovered some other interesting finds. In the 1940 volume library workers found original pictures of the famous “burning of the mortgage” glued to the back cover. They are currently looking into ways to safely remove the pictures and add them to the rest of the archives on the Internet.
Once the digitizing process has caught up to the current year, the library will effect a one-year delay before uploading new volumes. Consequently, the 2009-2010 yearbook will be viewable the spring of 2011. This policy was decided based on the scanning time and the yearbook’s financial policy.
The process of uploading the old yearbooks began in Oct. 2009. As of Wednesday Feb. 24, viewable copies of the Petit Jean are available from the 1924-1925 volume to the 1957-1958 volume. They are located on is http://digital.harding.edu. There are also links to them from Harding’s student news site, the Link, as well as Brackett Library’s home page.
