The Shelf Where the Yearbooks Lived

In my parents' house my brother, my sister, and I each had our own shelf where we kept our yearbooks. We got our first one in kindergarten and then collected one a year every year until we graduated from high school, making a set of thirteen books that chronicled our progress through childhood. For kids going through school now, there is also the option of online yearbooks.

An online yearbook provides the same kind of versatility that one would expect of any Web-based content. The online layout provides for a greater range of design than a traditional yearbook provides, and because the content is not constrained by a specific number of pages it creates more opportunity for expression as well.

The traditional, printed yearbook created an opportunity to teach students the basics of publishing. At least in high school, most schools provide a class that produces the yearbook, and that class teaches writing, editing, layout, and the preparation of a manuscript for printing. Those lessons provided students with a basic understanding that they could take into a career in publishing. Even outside of publishing, those lessons could apply to a broad spectrum of careers.

With that opportunity for instruction, however, there was also the disadvantage of traditional publishing: cost. Paper, ink, and the assembly of a book all cost money, and the small improvements one can make to make a printed piece look better (like higher quality paper or binding) cost even more money. In public schools with hundreds or more than a thousand students who have to be included in the yearbook, that creates a problem. There is only so much those students are going to pay for a yearbook, and that leaves little room for creativity.

In most schools, the number of pages that can be printed at an affordable rate simply can't contain everything important that happens in the school in a year. Consequently, one of the most difficult aspects of compiling a yearbook is figuring out what to leave out. Unfortunately, that means that the most popular and involved students fill the pages, while less popular students and activities are marginalized or left out entirely.

Making yearbooks electronic relieves that burden, allowing the creators of the yearbook to include far more content. This provides an opportunity for people and groups who were not traditionally featured in paper yearbooks to still have their own pages and their own stories told. It also provides much more opportunity for self expression, allowing people to document the way that they see themselves.

In some ways the online yearbook presents the same opportunities as an online social network. It allows people to put the spotlight on themselves and to document their own experience. It allows the connections between people to be formed. It allows the groups that people participate in to be described. It allows for a photographic record to be captured. And at the end of the year, it stops and is saved - placing that period of time in a capsule to be looked at years later.

Of course, online yearbooks have not yet replaced paper ones, and for the time being they will probably remain an extension of the traditional, printed volume. That is, until the online yearbook producers figure out how to capture all the signatures and comments that classmates scribble on the last day of school. For us, reading those old notes is the best part of looking through an old yearbook.