The Shelf Where The Yearbooks Lived
When I was growing up my brother, my sister, and I all had our own shelf where we kept our yearbooks
. We began to collect them when we were in elementary school, and by the time we graduated from college we each had a stack of thirteen yearbooks, chronicling our progress through school and childhood. Now, kids going through school have the option of online yearbooks.
Like any online content, online yearbooks provide a greater level of versatility than printed volumes. The layout of a Web page isn't static like a printed page; it is more flexible and affords a wider range of design. It is also not tied to a specific number of pages, and so an online yearbook provides far more room for creativity and expression.
The traditional yearbook is not just a memento of a year in school. It is also a vehicle that is used to teach students in yearbook classes the rudiments of writing, editing, and layout, as well as the technical aspects of preparing a manuscript for printing. That education is, of course, directly applicable to publishing. But there are also many other careers that require the creation of polished presentation materials, and this knowledge is valuable in any of them.
Traditional yearbooks also had the disadvantage of cost, however, just like any other printed material. Ink, paper, and binding costs money. Using high quality paper and a binding that will be durable enough to last as long as most people want to keep their yearbook costs even more money. Public schools can have more than a thousand students, who will only pay so much for their yearbook. Trying to cram all of their experience into a limited number of pages doesn't leave much 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.
In an online yearbook, the page-count constraint does not exist. That allows the editors to be far more creative in how they present the information and far more exhaustive in the information they include. Relieved of the need to narrow the content down, they can indulge the fringes of the school's society rather than simply skimming the surface of its center. That allows more inclusion of unpopular students and activities that tend to stay on the periphery.
A level of personalization and customization emulates a social network, and to an extent the online yearbook presents the same sort of opportunity for connection, documentation, and communication. People can collect their friends; they can share photographs that further document their experience of the year. However, at the end of the year the opportunity to add new content ends, creating a sort of time capsule to be looked back on 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.
by: addyieweeks
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