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The Alumni Touchscreen

Rita Heithoff on May 12, 2016

The new Alumni touchscreen was installed May 11th by Roger and Evelyn Bartlett from the SectorNow company.  It's a 55" touchscreen that will display over 3000 alumni photos at a touch.  This has been a four year long project to find a way to preserve Elgin High's alumni photos.  Many of the composites were damaged and in poor condition. Being an EHS alumnus I wanted to find a way to not only preserve Elgin Public's history but make it accessible to all EHS Alumni and not just the ones who live in the area.

I started the project four years ago and had my yearbook class help out when they had time between pages.  At the time the goal was to put all of the photos on the school webpage.  This was not only a way to preserve the composites in case of a fire or tornado but also a way to let alumni who had moved away from Elgin view the photos.  

This process started with me taking the composites down, taking them apart and photographing each individual student and then reassembling the composites. After the the alumni were photographed, myself and my students, who had down time between their yearbook pages, helped rotate the photos, crop them and retouch when necessary in a photo editing program. Some photos did not need any work and some required as much as a half hour of work each.  Now multiply that by 3298 images and you can understand why the process took four years. The photo editing website, www.befunky.com became our best friend as we edited the 3000+ images  The photos were then sorted by class and decade.  Several students helped me out on this project over the course of four years. We were excited to have the photos displayed on the school webpage www.elgineagles.org.

But then this year the Board and Administration attended a school board convention and were introduced to the SectorNow company that installs touchscreens at schools to display their alumni information, school records and anything else the school would like.  After viewing their work the school board approved the purchase of the system and we were off and running to finish the photos and submit them to SectorNow.  All of the alumni should be on display by the 2016 Alumni Banquet not only on the new touchscreen but also on www.elgineagles.org.