[Michlib-l] Responses to "Making OCI Yearbooks Available on your Website."

[Julie Censke]

Good Afternoon,

Several people on this listserve asked me to share the responses I received regarding making OCI yearbooks available on a website. They are listed below.

1.       We put ours on archive.org and have the links on our website. I requested release forms from the school district superintendents and did not post any recent yearbooks that have current students so that no one who is currently under 18 would have their picture online.

2.       I processed the TIF files we received from OCI and made the yearbooks into PDF files using Adobe Acrobat, and then made those available on the web through our Omeka site for local history stuff. You can use Omeka for free and host the content on your own server, but they do charge a hosting fee if you want them to host the content.

It's just one of many ways you could make them available! I'm behind on getting all of the yearbooks up there, and ultimately, I think we're only going to make available up to 1940, for privacy reasons (1940 being the most recent census data available).

I don't see why you couldn't just list them on a webpage as well in your WordPress site, rather than using a service like Omeka... Omeka just makes it easier to search within files, which WordPress likely won't do.

3. We are in the process of getting them ready, but will have them on the website using the free digital repository software from George Mason University, Omeka (https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fomeka.org%2F&data=02%7C01%7CJulie.Censke%40monroe.lib.mi.us%7Cc68b2eb9ff5d4be53a0308d55db71d7c%7C526ff4e31ba7453c9fb17562147081dd%7C0%7C1%7C636517963434743532&sdata=ZnWUfIDZYyZoR5MYL8aQHA%2Fa33JR0wexIR%2FYEboWezQ%3D&reserved=0). It’s similar to ContentDM, but not ridiculously expensive.
Since the yearbooks aren’t public yet, I can’t show you, but here’s an example of another PDF document:
https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.branchdistrictlibrary.org%2Fbranch%2Fitems%2Fshow%2F4589&data=02%7C01%7CJulie.Censke%40monroe.lib.mi.us%7Cc68b2eb9ff5d4be53a0308d55db71d7c%7C526ff4e31ba7453c9fb17562147081dd%7C0%7C1%7C636517963434743532&sdata=32oNn6FTnlLdYISiXdwtzbl8WCKIVTH1pkjaTpyEnTs%3D&reserved=0
Not all of our yearbooks were OCR’d by OCI, so they were not all searchable by default. Our workflow has included doing the OCR on the ones that needed it, then doing some conversion of all the PDFs to make the file sizes smaller before we post them. Once they are there, Omeka lets you search by keyword and also create custom exhibits and stuff like that. We have good Internet connection and in-house web server, so we’re not worried about the bandwidth at this point.


Thank you to everyone that responded.


Julie Censke

Colon Township Library

(269) 432-3958

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