I am a Master of Library and Information Studies student, and I’m continuing a project I started during my first year practicum.

As a summer student for the Dalhousie Archives and Special Collections, I’m working to digitize some of the first yearbooks produced by Dalhousie University. The yearbooks, called Pharos, began in the late 1920s and continued until the 1990s.

The tools I use for the digitization process are quite interesting. Some of the books had many extra copies, so I was able to dismantle them and scan them on a normal scanner. Others only had one copy in storage, which meant I had to use the overhead book scanner. The scanner is quite a contraption [click 3rd photo] and it took me the better part of a week to figure out why my scans were not turning out. After I digitize them, I edit them for clarity in Photoshop, which I had never used before. It was quite a trial and error process to decide which settings were most useful. When they are edited and combined into one file, I upload each one to the Dalhousie Libraries’ online repository, DalSpace. Once the yearbooks are there, they are available to everyone for viewing. It’s interesting to see through these books how Dalhousie has changed from a small ‘college by the sea’ to an internationally renowned university.

You can view yearbooks that have already been digitized in DalSpace!

Overhead book scanner with 1952 issue of Pharos