Digital project captures the past

EAST BRIDGEWATER

50 old yearbooks now posted online

December 08, 2011|By Christine Legere, Globe Correspondent

Access is what libraries are all about, says Carrie Tucker, East Bridgewater High School librarian, and now anyone who can log onto the Internet can check out 50 years of that town’s high school yearbooks with the click of a mouse, whether they are across the street or across the Atlantic.

The digitization of 50 editions (1960-2009) of The Torch was made possible with a $100,000 federal grant awarded by the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners to the Boston Public Library, to help provide broad access to records and documents of cultural institutions across the state by making them available online.

East Bridgewater was one of the first to submit a project, and became the first in the state to have its yearbooks digitized for free. They are now available on the high school’s website and on Digital Commonwealth, the state repository for such online data.

“The offer had gone out to all libraries, museums, and historical groups,’’ Tucker said. “I thought every library in the state would jump on this opportunity.’’ She quickly secured the go-ahead from high school principal Paul Vieira and completed the online application several weeks ago. She heard it was accepted about two weeks later.

A Boston Public Library team typically will evaluate the condition of documents and photographs to be digitized; the local library, meanwhile, must organize its materials.

Led by Tom Blake, digital projects manager, team members showed up in East Bridgewater last month. “Five of them came to the high school in this tiny Zipcar,’’ Tucker said. “They got out, spent 20 minutes, and left with the yearbooks.’’ Not long after, the material was available online.

Norwood is not far behind.

Norwood High School’s librarian, Beth Goldman, said she expected to have her material ready by last week. “What we’re most concerned about are the earlier yearbooks,’’ she said. “They are very small with covers made of paper. The early ones, from 1922, have just a few black-and-white pictures,’’ and the books are dilapidated from years of use.

“They are falling apart, and if that happens, we’re not going to keep little pieces of paper,’’ Goldman said.

She said she plans to start with 1922 and go as far as she can under the grant’s limits. “It’s a little bit of history and it seems people are really attached to their high school memories,’’ she said. “It’s also a nice way to bridge generations in a family.’’

The digitization service isn’t limited to yearbooks. Under the grant program, applicants can ask to have up to 50 volumes or 5,000 individual items - such as photos, manuscript pages, or posters - digitized. To date, 19 organizations have submitted projects.