The University Library's Digital Library Initiatives is currently working to make the University’s entire yearbook collection - dating back to 1897 - viewable online.

The Volunteer Yearbooks, which are the creations of UT students, are accessible to anyone with a computer with just the click of a button. The only year not provided is 1918 because of the circumstances surrounding World War I.

Director of Digital Library Initiatives Melanie Feltner-Reichert addresses their decision to make the yearbooks available online.

“Digital Library Initiatives creates unique and valuable digital collections to support the research and teaching needs of its community," she said. "The Volunteer Yearbooks tell the history of the University of Tennessee through the eyes of the student body. The publication’s unique historical value made it a logical choice for online delivery by DLI. And like all other DLI digital collections, the yearbook images are preserved in a digital archive to ensure ongoing access to the materials.”

The entire collection will be up in eight weeks, she said.

“We are digitizing the remaining older issues; and are working with the Student Publications Office to obtain the 90s forward, which are already in digital format,” Feltner-Reichert said.

DLI is using two methods of digitizing the yearbooks, which are dependent on the condition of each book.

Yearbooks are digitized in one of two ways, Feltner-Reichert explained. The first is done by hand-placement on a high-end flatbed scanner. This retains the original binding of the issue. Sometimes the pages are fed through a scanner with an automatic document feeder, which requires "de-binding" the issue.

The second method is more efficient but could not be used for yearbooks in bad physical condition, or for those which only one copy exists, Feltner-Reichert said.

"Once the pages are digitized, we extract the text using optical character recognition software," she said. "This allows full-text searching of the yearbooks. The images and text are then indexed in a locally-developed database, and presented to the general public for browsing and searching."

The yearbooks have already caught the attention of many.

“The collection had nearly 70,000 hits Sept. 25,” said Feltner-Reichert, which when the DLI sent out the announcement e-mail about the yearbooks.