Into the Digital Age: Whitley teacher working to create online database of all past yearbooks

For Whitley County High School teacher Scott Powell, documenting history is simply part of everyday life. Whether it be through his photography, both professionally and on a volunteer basis, putting together media guides for the school district’s athletic programs, or serving as the head of the yearbook team, he fully understands the importance of capturing moments for future generations to study and enjoy.

Now, with his own personal legacy in mind, Powell is undertaking a project that he hopes will benefit Whitley County alumni for generations to come as he seeks to create a complete online database of all WCHS yearbooks, beginning with the 1963-64 school year and progressing into modern day.

“Our school doesn’t have all of the yearbooks,” Powell said when asked why he has decided to commit his time and energy to this project. “There is a total gap in history there. When I took over doing the yearbooks I started doing some archiving, and I found that it went back as far as 1999, so there was a lot of history that was missing.”

Since discovering the lack of archived material at WCHS, Powell has managed to track down and scan many older annuals into his digital database. With the help of several members of the Whitley community, he has completed scanning all of the books from the 1960’s, and he is currently working his way through the 1970’s.

“The community has been very helpful with helping me find the books,” Powell said. “When I first started posting about the project, people responded saying they couldn’t wait to see their books online. It really has been a community effort. I get messages all the time from people who are excited to see these when the project is complete.”

As for the process of actually uploading an annual once he has it in his possession, Powell said that he can complete an entire book in about an hour-and-a-half, assuming he has no distractions. Once the digital files are created, he can then use those for a variety of purposes, including the creation of things like posters, and even wall transfers.

“The scanner takes it and puts it into a .pdf file that is easy to manipulate,” Powell explained. “That makes it easy to make edits, and to print the images.”

Powell said that he has thought about this project for several years, but with him taking the lead on creating the school’s yearbooks back in 2019, he was able to finally begin turning the goal into a reality.

“I had this on my mind several years ago,” Powell said. “I was thinking about how we could do this, and thought at first that we could just photograph each page. You would be looking at a monstrous amount of editing work if you did that, though, so we got the scanner, which can scan an entire book that is laying open.”

“This is going to end up being my last big project for the school,” Powell continued. “The school will end up having a digital copy of every book once I am done. The ultimate goal is to be able to upload them to the school district’s website. We are still working out the details of that, but I would like to help create a page on the website for alumni. People will be able to access the database and make copies of images if they wanted to use them for things like reunions.”

Powell said he doesn’t want to stop with just the Whitley County High School annuals, adding that he hopes to also include middle school and grade school yearbooks as well.

He even said that he would like to add scans of some of the county’s old high schools that existed prior to consolidation in the mid-sixties.

If everything goes to plan, Powell said that his hopeful timeline for having this project completed would be sometime during the 2023-24 school year.