UAlbany Digitizes More Than a Century of Yearbooks, Now Available Online
By Amy Geduldig
ALBANY, N.Y. (May 6, 2026) — Before Instagram, before Snap, before our phones were full of photos (or even existed), there were yearbooks. With titles like Neon, Pedagogue and Torch, these hardbound books of faces, places and names chronicled life at the University at Albany. The pages captured what students looked like, what they cared about and how they experienced the world. Now, all of it is just a click away.
More than 100 years of campus history are now available online, opening up a rich archive to Great Danes young and old. Alumni can look up old classmates or spot themselves in a photo; students can see what campus looked like when Uptown first opened in 1966 or track how fashion, art or music changed over time. Or simply appreciate that some things never change — like Albany winters.
“They loved taking pictures of snow — every single one has pictures of snow. I don’t know if they just came from places that don’t get a lot of snow… or if it was like, ‘wow, this is a real winter’ and they felt like they needed to document it,” said Mary Howard, conservation technician at University Libraries and the project coordinator who spent years digitizing the yearbooks for the for Special Collections, Archives and Preservation department.
But what stood out to Howard most was “how the students handled tragedy…with such sensitivity and maturity.”
The yearbooks offer a window into how students experienced significant moments in history. From world wars to Sept. 11, the yearbooks chronicle not just what happened, but how students responded at the time.
Behind the scenes, the project was a meticulous process of scanning each year page by page. Some volumes were harder to capture than others, particularly when names disappeared into tight bindings, requiring extra care to preserve every detail.
“If [people] go looking for it, they’ll see the picture and their name. I tried as hard as I could to get that in there,” Howard said.
The effort was driven by demand: Yearbooks are one of the most requested materials in the archives. “So many people were calling and asking for this… now they can just go online.”
