I'm So Sorry, but Your High School Yearbook Is Hitting the Web

If you live in Massachusetts, I have some bad news for you! And if this becomes a trend nationwide and beyond, I have some bad news for everybody!

According to the Boston Globe, the Boston Public Library is currently digitizing high school yearbooks across the state in an effort to “digitize as many of the state’s historically significant documents as possible and make them available online.” You’d think that would mean, like, pilgrim shit—and it does—but also your puberty face! Sorry!

So basically, the BPL, which acts as the Library for the Commonwealth, asked librarians to send in whatever docs they think need to be preserved for future generations (they offered 15,000 pages of free digitization to sweeten the deal) and instead of submitting irreplaceable documents cataloguing America’s earliest days, or whatever, they sent in yearbooks.

The library content discovery manager, Tom Blake, gave the Globe this choice quote which made me choke on my water a lil bit:

“We have these great imaging labs, and we pictured all these treasures coming in the door…Instead, it was yearbooks.”

I mean, I guess it makes sense—yearbooks are easily the most used/requested docs at the local library level, but also: fucking LOL.

Since I didn’t go to high school in Massachusetts, or the United States for that matter, allow me to present my senior yearbook picture from Baumholder American High School circa 2009. Go bucs? (Our mascot was literally a pirate, and I think there was a rumor that the school building used to be a Nazi prison? Gotta love teenage imagination.)