High-Tech Memories : Schools Experiment With Putting Yearbooks on CD-ROM

Yearbooks, you remember them--those musty, leather-bound tomes memorializing school days in staged black-and-white group shots and senior quotes.

Increasingly, these quaint paper artifacts aren’t enough for some teens weaned on computer games and the World Wide Web. Many want something a little more high-tech from their high school memorabilia.

Enter the CD-ROM, the latest trend in nontraditional yearbooks. With a little help from a local software company, Thousand Oaks and Adolfo Camarillo high schools--along with two Thousand Oaks elementary schools--are experimenting with CD-ROM yearbooks.

“Because we’re among the first to do this, it’s uncharted territory,” said Thousand Oaks High School junior Adam Fouse, one of half a dozen students putting the Lancer Legend YearDisc together. “Last year’s paper yearbook is compared to those of the last 30 years. With this [CD-ROM], we’re setting a new standard. We’re creating history.”

History as told by the Thousand Oaks teens is still in its rough draft. So far their CD-ROM contains photographs of seniors and little else. But with a few deft keystrokes, junior Anders Yarbrough shows the technology’s potential by loading a YearDisc prototype he helped create last year for a Thousand Oaks software company.

A click of the mouse brings up a student activities page and several photographs of clubs. Another click brings up a photograph of ballet dancers--and suddenly the yearbook talks. And moves. Video of a dance recital and narration flash across the screen.

But don’t shelve paper yearbooks just yet.

Students, teachers and administrators are predicting that CD-ROM yearbooks will be a complement to--rather than a replacement for--the paper product. One reason? It’s harder than heck to cram all of your friends’ autographs on a 4 1/2-inch plastic disc.

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“I just can’t see kids lining up at the end of the year to pick up their yearbooks in a jewel case,” said Santa Susana High School Vice Principal Robert Thompson. “I just can’t picture it replacing the paper yearbooks. People like to open them up and sign them. I think [CD-ROMs] would be supplements.”

That said, Thompson added that his school--an arts and technology magnet--would like to experiment with a CD-ROM yearbook and possibly personalized videos.

Both CD-ROMS and videos are technologically advanced incarnations of the time-tested yearbook, said Tom Rolnicki, executive director of the nonprofit National Scholastic Press Assn. at the University of Minnesota. The press association provides education and support for student media and runs national contests for student newspapers and yearbooks.

Videos had their heyday in the 1980s and have since fizzled, Rolnicki said, in part because they were easy for students to duplicate themselves. The first known CD-ROM yearbook was produced at South Eugene High School in Oregon in the early 1990s, he said.

By now, he estimates CD-ROMs have caught on in a few hundred of the country’s roughly 30,000 high schools. They are most popular in affluent suburbs, where schools have the available technology to produce CD-ROMs and where families have the technology to run them at home.

“It’s probably less than 5% of the total yearbooks sold,” Rolnicki said, predicting that the market could grow to 25% within a decade. “It’s still a small amount, but kids are excited about it, because they’re tuned in to computers and technology. . . . The schools that are producing CD-ROMs tend to be the agenda-setters. Other schools will look at them as trend-setters to follow.”

The CD-ROM trend appears enduring enough that the press association is launching its first national CD-ROM yearbook contest this year.

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Already, Thousand Oaks students are embracing the high-tech idea, opting to buy the discs with the hardback books. This year, the CD will not be sold separately, but as a companion to the paper yearbook. Although still early in the school year, the student store has taken orders for about 100 discs, said Anders, the YearDisc editor. He hopes to sell at least 500 by June.

The discs are selling for $20 each, with the $50 yearbook. The high school received the CD-ROM hardware after paying $2,500 to cover the pressing costs of the first 100 discs, said Barry Peters, chief executive officer of YearDisc Systems Inc., a Thousand Oaks company. Subsequent discs will cost less, allowing Thousand Oaks High to make a profit or pass the savings on to students.

Even students who lack school spirit say the CD-ROM concept has merit.

“I wouldn’t purchase it or a regular yearbook, because I don’t like it here,” said senior Steve Smith, 17. “But, when you think about it, a CD-ROM is pretty cool.”

Freshman Gina Marlotta, who was munching a sandwich to the strains of the Backstreet Boys ringing through the Thousand Oaks High quad, was more enthusiastic. She’ll probably buy one with her yearbook.

“I think it not only reflects high school but also what’s going on in our age,” she said. “It’s a good idea to look back on the technology of our era.”

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Camarillo High students won’t begin putting their YearDiscs together until January, but yearbook advisor Ellen Kersey said her students are already jazzed about the prospects.

“This is the yearbook of the future,” said Kersey, an English teacher. “Each kid will be able to have his or her own page with his or her activities. You can add audio and video. It’s a wonderful thing.”

But Kersey said the nonlinear form of CD-ROMS, in which various items are loosely linked, means that an ornery student could potentially hide something obscene--a raunchy song snippet, for example--on the disc, making the editing process more complicated for her. She will ask her disc-makers and their parents to sign a contract vowing to keep the disc PG-rated.

Her only other fear is that 20 years from now the CD-ROM technology could be obsolete.

“What if CD-ROMS become the eight-tracks of coming decades?” Kersey asked. “The way technology is advancing, who’s to say the CDs you buy today will be usable tomorrow?”

Not to fear, said Peters of YearDisc Systems Inc. His company will keep master copies of the discs and upgrade them to digital videodiscs (DVDs) or load them onto the Internet as technology advances.