Now you can relive high school days online

Staff at the Newton Public Library have been hard at work transferring Newton High School yearbooks into a digital archive. With hours of work in, the group was excited to announce they have completed the project with more than 100 years of yearbooks finding new life online.

The process, which saw yearbooks dating back to 1911 going online, has made it easier for people to access in information in an online archive. The yearbooks are uploaded in their entirety with each page finding new life online.

“The archive is free to access. Anyone can see from any place with an internet connection and you do not need to have a library card with us to use that,” public services librarian Becca Klein said. “We have more than 100 years of Newton High School yearbooks up on the site.”

If you are looking for a specific person in the yearbooks, Klein said there is no reason to worry. During the process, the staff made a search function to make looking for someone specific easily done.

“The yearbooks have the entire graduating class listed in a keyword searchable format ... It’ll pull up the year that they graduated,” Klein said.

Additionally, with the completion of all of the yearbooks, the NPL will continue to digitize yearbooks typically once a year, Klein said. The agreement with the school district allowed them to do the yearbooks up to three years ago but more will come.

“When they publish a new one in the spring then we can do one more,” Klein said.

There are benefits, other than being able to view yearbooks online for free, that come with the yearbooks being digitized. Klein said some of the older yearbooks are a little more fragile and this can help eliminate people handling the physical copies.

“Having them available online just sort of opens up another avenue for people to access those without necessarily having to come into the library and use the physical books,” Klein said.

The yearbooks are already popular as it is. Klein said within the past two weeks, the views on the digital yearbooks has gone up immensely and that hasn’t been just from people living within Jasper County. People originally from Newton but have since moved away are even looking at them.

“We’ve actually had people from other states call the library and tell us they have been looking at stuff in our archive,” Klein said. “(They) have called to ask questions or tell us how much they love it.”

To view the yearbooks online visit the library’s website and navigate to the about section then go to the research drop down and click the digital archive section of the site to find the yearbooks.

“There is no restriction to access for those,” Klein said.

Contact Dustin Teays at
641-792-3121 ext. 6533
or dteays@newtondailynews.com