It may still be summer vacation, but school’s never out at the Flin Flon Heritage Project.
The online consortium of local history has been adding decades’ worth of Hapnot Collegiate yearbooks in virtual form.
“There is no completion date because the years keep rolling by,” says Beatrice Walker, vice-president of the Heritage Project.
Walker has spent the past two years meticulously scanning each page of every Hapnot yearbook dating back to the apparent first edition in 1945.
Depending on the size of the book, each edition takes about two and a half hours to scan before its upload onto the history-preserving website.
Each yearbook added to the site is made available for download as a PDF, a file format that enables a viewing experience that differs little from physically holding the book.
Editions
Walker found most of the yearbooks at Hapnot, where she is a teacher. If she was missing an edition, she took to Facebook to see if anyone could lend her the absent text.
The response from past and present Flin Flonners has been one of appreciation.
“I know when I was in high school, not everybody got a yearbook every year,” says Walker, a native of Creighton. “I don’t have a yearbook for every year I was there, because people just didn’t buy them like that.”
In terms of scanning, Walker is now up to the 1990 edition of the Flinonian, as the yearbook is called. She expects to be up to date in about a year.
But “up to date” may not mean “current.” Walker is toying with the idea of letting each graduation year pass a few years before posting the newer yearbooks. She doesn’t want to hinder Hapnot’s yearbook sales.
Looking ahead, the Heritage Project may also include yearbooks from other area schools, such as Ecole McIsaac School, Creighton Community School and the now-defunct Sir Maurice Roche High School.
