As part of my “rescue raids” of historic memorabilia from Harriet Gibbons High School, I’m coming across several vintage and rare school yearbooks. These are truly treasures, and are irreplaceable.
The earliest yearbook associated with the school that I’ve found so far dates back to 1972 – you can see the yearbook contents by clicking on the picture on the right. This would have been the second graduating class of the old Street Academy, and shows the school’s earliest home locations as the rectory of St. John’s in the Pastures neighborhood, as well as the old South End Teen Center, and the offices of the Albany branch of the Urban League at 55 Columbia Street, where the school was based before moving uptown to Clinton Avenue. This is also one of the earliest yearbooks to feature the partnership that created the school – Sister Maryellen Harmon and the rest of the nuns of the Kenwood Academy of the Sacred Heart, working with the Albany chapter of the Urban League (who housed the school at their building for a few years), and a staff that included Bob Peterkin (who is currently a professor at Harvard) and volunteer teachers and educators throughout the community.
In preserving these yearbooks (and making copies available online at my high school tribute page), I’m trying to make sure these historic documents are properly archived and maintained for public view. This is important to me. I don’t want the Albany City School District erasing my school history any more than the premier of the Soviet Union was able to erase the accomplishments of the previous premier of the Soviet Union.
With that, I’m taking the time to digitally scan in every yearbook, from cover to cover and page to page. My equipment includes an Epson RX680 flatbed scanner and Corel PhotoPaint 9 software – yes, the software’s about five versions old, but it works well and I don’t get rid of things that work well.
Each page of the yearbook, from cover to cover, is individually scanned at 300 dots per inch and in 24-bit color – except for those pages that are black-and-white; those pages are scanned in 300 dots per inch, 8-bit greyscale. Each page is then digitally cropped to the same width and height. Any pages that have photos or pictures need to have the digital noise removed -since yearbook photos are printed with a low dots-per-inch ratio print, scanning these photos can cause a moiré pattern on the screen, as if you were looking at the pictures through a wire porch screen. I have to run a “remove moiré” scan on each file, which will get rid of the stray dot patterns and smooth out the photo, so that the image is clear at any size.
After all pages are cropped and processed, I combine all the images into an Adobe PDF file. This high-resolution copy of the yearbook will be used for archive and research purposes, and can be reprinted as needed.
Those PDF’s, however, are monstrously large. If I try to upload them to the tribute site, anyone who opens them will have a major wait time before the yearbook PDF loads into their browsers.
So after I’ve made the “archival” copy of the yearbook, I re-sample each scanned page, reducing their resolutions from 300 dots per inch to 72 dots per inch. Those files are then combined into a new PDF, which is then uploaded to the tribute site.
One other thing. Not everybody appreciates the idea of having their memories up on a website. One Harriet Gibbons graduate contacted me and said she wanted her yearbook taken off the site, because she did not her image up for all to see. After much negotiation, we reached a compromise. I would keep the yearbook on the site, but any shots of her in the yearbook would be digitally blocked out. The archival copy, however, would have the yearbook as originally printed, but it would not be available online.
Yearbooks are an important part of any school’s history and legacy. You can see, right there on the page, all the fashions and hair styles of that exact time period.
It would be a shame if that history was ever lost.
Chuck The Writer 