Library’s Pekinian yearbooks go digital

By Jared Olar
Library assistant

The Pekin Public Library’s Pekin Community High School yearbooks are among the areas of the library’s Local History Room collection that get the most use, whether it’s someone looking up old friends or researching family history, or simply reminiscing about old times. The Pekinians are invaluable sources of information about Pekin high school history.

For many years, the library’s “Pekinian” yearbook collection has been available for patrons to peruse or for photocopying yearbook pages or student pictures. With the passage of time, however, inevitably the older volumes suffer wear and tear.

With the goal of reducing wear to our yearbooks and protecting them from damage in order to preserve them for the future, the Pekin Public Library has had its Pekinians for the years from 1908 to 2014 scanned and digitized by OCI Records Conversion in Oklahoma.

Each yearbook from 1908 to 2014 has been scanned from cover to cover, and the scanned images have been burned to individual disks. These scanned images were then uploaded to a portable external hard drive that library patrons may use in Adult Services.

Those who would like to make copies of images from the digitized yearbooks can ask to borrow the external drive. Library staff can show patrons how to plug the external drive into one of the library’s public computers in the Adult Computer Lab, and then assist them if the patrons need help with printing off images or saving copies of pages to a personal flash drive.

The original Pekinians will remain in the locked Local History Room cabinet, and the more recent yearbooks that have not yet been digitized will still be available there. Just ask a librarian to get them out for you.

The growth of Pekin over the past century or so may be seen in this comparison of the senior class photographs from the very first Pekinian in 1908 with those of the 2014 Pekinian. In 1908, the entire senior class fit on a single page, but in 2014 the first page of senior photos only goes from Adams to Beasley.

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