We are pleased to announce the newest addition to our local online resources, digital yearbooks! More specifically, the Hamiltonians, yearbooks from Hamilton Central School from the years 1950-1989, excluding for some unknown reason 1969!
These are available for free to anyone who wants to look at them. You can find them on the “Local History” tab on our website, or through New York Heritage’s website (NYHeritage.org) if you want to hunt a bit (and find other neat New York history gems).
This was a project that had been ongoing for some time, beginning a few years ago with previous Assistant Director Meghan Bremiller responding to an ad from the Oklahoma Department of Corrections who was reaching out to institutions to have their inmates digitize materials. We took them up on their offer, sent them a few boxes of yearbooks, and they returned them, along with CDs filled with PDFs from every book – even the ads! All we had to do was create metadata to correspond with each yearbook to publish it online. Well, that project took a back seat and was forgotten about, until a couple months ago when I stumbled upon the CD again, this time in a folder marked “Intern Projects.”
As you may have surmised, we finally were able to secure an intern through Colgate University through their Community-Based Work Study program. Marisa Modugno, a junior Peace and Conflict Studies major at Colgate (and Work Study student in question), wasted no time in creating the data we needed in order to upload these yearbooks to the web. Thanks, Marisa! After that, all we needed was permission from the copyright-holder, who in this case was the School itself. Thanks to Superintendent Dowsland for signing our permission slip so quickly!
Once all our ducks were in a row, Ryan Perry, the Digital Collections Librarian at the Central New York Library Resources Council took all of our information and uploaded the collection. So that’s the long story of how we got these yearbooks put up on the web. Take a walk down memory lane with us online this holiday season!
Thank you for reading and stay safe.
