This is an archival post originally published on February 17, 2010.
Aug. 18, 2010: Updated with new URLs for the yearbooks and the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center.
A slice of UNC history is now online with digitized student yearbooks from 1890 through 1966 and early issues of the Carolina Alumni Review.
The Hellenian and Yackety Yack yearbooks provide a rich resource for learning about student life in the past, said Nick Graham, program coordinator of the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center based at UNC’s Wilson Special Collections Library.
The center digitized the yearbooks and published them to the Web as part of a yearbook digitization project that currently also includes Appalachian State University, Elon University, and Elizabeth City State University.
Graham said that the historic yearbooks provide an interesting window on student life over the years, including the ways that attitudes and fashions evolved.
The online yearbooks contain senior photographs of some of UNC’s best-known alumni, including writer Thomas Wolfe (class of 1920), journalist Charles Kuralt (1955), retiring UNC President Erskine Bowles (1967), and sports broadcaster Woody Durham (1963).
The North Carolina Digital Heritage Center is a new program based in the North Carolina Collection in Wilson Library. The center works with cultural heritage institutions throughout the state to digitize and share their historic materials online.
The North Carolina Collection has additionally digitized the first twelve volumes of the Carolina Alumni Review, covering the years 1912-1924.
The yearbooks and alumni magazines were digitized using one of the three high-speed “Scribe” scanners in the Carolina Digital Library and Archives in Wilson Library. Each Scribe is capable of digitizing approximately 3,000 pages of text per day.
