News

Old HHS, Ninth Avenue School yearbooks digitized, available to public

By Lightning Reports, Published: September 30, 2019

Old yearbooks from Hendersonville High School and the Ninth Avenue School are now available on line at the Digital Heritage Center thanks to a project by the Henderson County Public Library to scan and preserve them.

Beginning last year, reference librarian Mark Burdette worked with partners at the Henderson County Genealogical and Historical Society and the Ninth Avenue Alumni group to assemble a large run of annuals from each school and loan them to the Digital Heritage Center located at UNC-Chapel Hill for digitization. This project is part of an ongoing program by the Digital Heritage Center to preserve North Carolina history. The only cost to the library was for shipping the annuals to Chapel Hill.

With the involvement of all the participants Ninth Avenue School annuals from 1950-1965 were digitized along with Hendersonville High School annuals from 1916, 1948-1953, 1956-1957, and 1959-1963 making valuable historical and genealogical resources available to the public for free.

“I am pleased with the outcome of this project and with the willingness of our community partners to lend their print resources,”  Burdette said. “We could not have made these books available to a wider audience without them and the Digital Heritage Center.”

The library will continue to seek out community partners to digitize annuals from other schools. Individuals interested in donating their annuals to the library for digitization should contact Burdette for details (mburdette@hendersoncountync.org, 828-697-4725 ext. 2307.