About this Digital Collection
Digitization of Niles Township High Schools Yearbooks
Skokie Public Library is responsible for digitizing these yearbooks from the Niles Township High Schools for the purposes of both preservation and ease of access.
The yearbooks themselves were digitized in several different projects over time, so the methods used have varied. The primary metadata production was done by Backstage Library Works (Provo, Utah) in February 2017. Most of the original (physical) yearbooks are Skokie Public Library’s print reference collection, which is why many of the digital copies have a label on the cover page saying, “Removal of this book from the Library constitutes a theft”. For the purposes of digitization, the Skokie Historical Society has loaned us copies of yearbooks we did not have in our collection.
Skokie Public Library will continue to add more issues of the yearbooks from Niles East, Niles West, and Niles North. In addition, we will continue to look for and welcome information about the issues that we do not have in this digital collection, including the 1983 Niles West Spectrum and the 1937 and 1969 Niles East Reflections.
Digitized yearbooks from Niles East and Niles West High Schools are also available from the Internet Archive.
Scanning and file information:
The oldest issues in the collection, the 1938 and 1939 Reflections from Niles East were scanned most recently and using a different protocol than the rest. Individual pages from the newspapers were each scanned at 400 dpi, 24-bit color using an Epson Perfection V600 Photo scanner and saved as individual TIFF files, in accordance with current digital archive best practices. We retain the TIFF files for long-term digital storage, but due to their large file size, we do not provide access to them online. Instead, the TIFF files were converted to PDF, digitally bound into individual issues of the yearbook, and run through optical character recognition (OCR) software so that the files would be searchable. Following this digitization process, descriptive metadata was created for each issue, which was then uploaded into the Omeka content management system, the interface used to browse, search, and view the collection.
Earlier scanning procedures varied from issue to issue and only PDF files were created, which are on view here. It is our intent, in the future, re-digitize our earlier work in order to provide better quality scans as well as to create TIFF files for long-term storage.
Rights:
The Niles North High School Saga, Reflections, and Spectrum yearbooks were created by the Niles Township High Schools and to the best of our knowledge, they neither registered for copyright nor displayed a copyright notice in its published issues. Works published between 1924 and 1978 fall into the public domain. If you have further information about this material, please contact our Digital Collections Librarian.
Skokie Public Library
Digital Collections Librarian
5215 Oakton Street
Skokie, IL 60077
Related digital collections:
Niles East High School newspaper from 1939-1980.
Historical photographs of schools in Skokie and Niles Center
Class portraits, school buildings, and diplomas from as early as 1886.
History of Niles Center and Skokie Schools.