JOHNSON CITY – Alumni of East Tennessee State University, current students curious about what the university was like in yesteryear, and other interested folks can now access several years’ worth of yearbooks thanks to the Archives of Appalachia in ETSU’s Center for Appalachian Studies and Services.
The Archives is in the ongoing process of digitizing all of the university’s yearbooks and making them available online.
ETSU’s yearbook was called “Old Hickory” during its first 10 years of publication, which began in 1919 after the university’s founding in 1911 as East Tennessee State Normal School. The name changed to “The Chalkline” in 1930, and it was known as “The Buccaneer” from 1937 to 1998, when it ceased publication.
Under the leadership of Dr. Jeremy Smith, director of the Archives of Appalachia, the project to digitize the yearbooks began in the fall of 2018. Student workers in the Archives scanned and saved pages, and when each successive yearbook was finished, a graduate assistant checked to make sure each page had been scanned correctly and prepared it to go online.
The digitization project had to be paused earlier this year when the university temporarily ceased on-campus operations due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but it will resume when operations resume. Smith anticipates needing two more semesters to complete the digitization of all remaining yearbooks.
Thus far, all of the yearbooks from 1919 through 1965 have been digitized and are now available through the university’s Digital Commons (https://dc.etsu.edu/yearbooks/), a digital preservation system managed by the Sherrod Library that also makes available copies of electronic theses and dissertations by ETSU students, publications authored by university faculty, and more.
“A lot of institutions are making their historic yearbooks available, and these are just tremendous resources for alumni, for researchers and for current students,” Smith said. “Descendants of our graduates, too, may want to go back and find a picture of their grandmother or grandfather, so it can be a great resource for families to learn more about their ancestors. They are a great value for the university.”
“Having the yearbooks in a digital format will truly immortalize our university’s history,” added Lee Ann Davis, director of University Alumni Programs for ETSU. “These snapshots in time are so important to our alumni to not only reminisce about their days at ETSU, but also share their favorite collegiate memories with family and friends.”
The yearbook project is part of a larger effort to digitally preserve the historic university documents and publications within the Archives’ holdings. Work is also ongoing to digitize the Archives’ regional collections, which include photographs, journals, diaries, manuscripts and recordings.
For more information on the Archives of Appalachia, visit www.etsu.edu/archives/.