Preserving Auburn's History

Written by James Harris (2013)

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Last April, Auburn Adventist Academy was blessed to have Alumnus, Caleb Riston from the Class of 2013, finish a project that converted all of our yearbooks and other photos throughout the years into an online format. To better understand this process, we asked him a few questions:


What inspired you to do this project? A real variety of things. I’ve long enjoyed the process of digitizing, organizing, and distributing old media and wanted to learn the process for books. I built a homemade book scanner partly for some personal projects but ultimately wanted to try using it to do a large comprehensive digitization project. When I was a student at AAA I spent a lot of time in the library going over the old archives of photos and yearbooks. I found a lot of people had no idea they existed or knew how to find them. As such, the memories they contained were essentially lost to the vast majority of people. I wanted people to have easy access to these materials so they could form their own understanding of AAA’s history if they so desired. This project accomplished all of my goals of learning new digitization and organization techniques, restoring hundreds of previously inaccessible pieces of media to the digital world, and distributing the content in an easily accessible form to a wide audience with no inconvenient restrictions. 

What were some of your methods in getting these yearbooks online? A complete technical exploration of the process can be viewed at bit.ly/AAScanProcess I used a set of plans created by Daniel Reetz to create a do it yourself archival grade book scanner aptly titled “The Archivist.” Reetz spent years perfecting the design to balance ease of construction with final image quality, then posted them to the public domain on diybookscanner.org. It took a lot of help from friends and family, but I got the pieces cut using a CNC and laser cutter in Walla Walla, then took them home and assembled them. After some testing and learning how to use it, I got in contact with AAA and got the go-ahead to stay in their dorm and digitize their collection.


How long did this project take? It took me 133.85 hours to find, sort, and scan all the books and assorted media during the initial process. I worked on the project intermittently from then until around the end of the year when I was able to focus on it again. I put in at least 105.78 hours by December on the processing and uploading but I’d stopped tracking by mid-December and never tracked all the time I spent in January. I’d estimate I put well in excess of 300 hours into the project. 



What happened after the scanning process was completed? Once the scanning was complete I edited the file in Lightroom. Each image was cropped, straightened, had some light color and light adjustments applied, and then exported. Each book was combined into a zip file of images that were uploaded to the Internet Archive. The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library that’s been running since 1996 and provides free tools to upload and share a wide variety of digital media. Each book was run through their derive process which created individual web pages for each book and ran optical character recognition for easy searching. A large amount of metadata was added to each book entry to make it easy for digital scholars to identify the books, what they’re about, and how they were digitized. Each book can be viewed online, downloaded in easy to use formats such as PDF, or downloaded in a “Raw Book Zip” which contains all the original image files so that anyone can make their own high-quality photos. 

 
Caleb’s Machine used to scan all of the yearbooks.

Caleb’s Machine used to scan all of the yearbooks.

The project is available in its entirety at bit.ly/AAAArchive. 

If you’d only like to see the yearbooks they’re available at bit.ly/AAAYearbooks. 

His whole step by step process is at bit.ly/AAScanProcess 

Any other questions for Caleb on this project can be sent to aaascanproject@outlook.com 



 

Some other special projects he has preserved for you to enjoy:

 
Katie Russell