Yearbook Flashback – Looking Back at 100 Years of SAIT Polytechnic
Posted by: In: Flashback, Yearbook Photos, Yearbook Samples 20 Sep 2013 Comments: 0 Tags: , , , ,

This week’s Yearbook Flashback features Canada’s oldest technical college, SAIT Polytechnic, or Southern Alberta Institute of Technology.

Established in 1916 in Calgary, Alberta, SAIT was also Canada’s first publicly funded technical institute and has won dozens of internationally recognized awards for it’s commitment to higher education standards.  With over 73,000 students registered in 2013, producing a Yearbook can be a massive undertaking, in terms of financial, technological and in human resources.

Flashback to SAIT Yearbook from 1946

SAIT Yearbook from 1946 shows an early version of Alberta’s provincial flag.

In recent years, they have created a fantastic online library to promote and preserve their school memories.   Available on the SAIT archive website are digitally preserved copies of their annual Yearbook for public viewing.  Their first Yearbook was published in 1918, and currently over 50 editions dating back to that first edition can be viewed online, with more Yearbooks being added as they are rediscovered.  Some of the editions are over 300 pages in size!  One can easily imagine that this book could be larger than some of the engineering textbooks that the students read.  In addition to the Yearbook archive, one can also view over 20,000 historic photographs from the campus and of the city of Calgary.

If you are a Yearbook designer or adviser, or are seeking out new ideas to incorporate into your Yearbook project, then archives like these are a great source for inspiration.  We highly recommend that you take some time to browse books from years past, and take screen shots or printout any pages or designs that catch your eye.  Watch this blog for more flashbacks and examples of Yearbooks from our distant and recent past.

The trend in archiving Yearbooks is quite popular at the college level, it’s hoped that more and more high schools can find the time and budget to start preserving their Yearbooks in a digital form online.  Our Yearbooks Desktop software creates a high resolution, digital PDF output of your Yearbook, which is the perfect format for archiving online.