Book ’em
BU is first school to offer customized yearbook
In the video above, learn how to create your customized yearbook. Narration by Kimberly Cornuelle
Open the BU 2010 yearbook and you’ll find the usual senior class portraits, along with the usual hockey game highlights and the usual shots of the Boston skyline. But this year, for the first time at any university, BU yearbook buyers can customize their books with pictures of friends, family, or life at BU.
Students can buy a yearbook with or without senior portraits — both versions include photos of campus, student life, and athletics. They can also choose whether to add their own photos to the mix, similar to photo books offered by companies like Snapfish and Flickr. This new yearbook can be viewed online and after being customized and ordered, will be printed and delivered to homes within 10 days.
Yearbook advisor Nelia Ponte says the University switched to the new format after years of dwindling sales of the traditional book. In 2004, she says, the class of 4,000 seniors bought 1,700 books. Last year, the same size class bought only 1,200.
Ponte knew that several schools, including Purdue University and the University of Virginia, had stopped printing yearbooks, so she worked with the College of Communication’s AdLab to survey students about what they wanted in a yearbook.
“A lot of schools blame Facebook for dwindling sales,” says Ponte. “But our students said that part of the reason they weren’t interested in purchasing a yearbook was that they weren’t in it. So we looked for ways to personalize the yearbook. It’s a generation of students who are used to making their own music playlists and watching TV online, so we figured, why not an iYearbook?”
Working with yearbook publishing company KCI, BU is the first school to offer personalized yearbooks. The 2010 yearbook, created by a staff of 12 student editors, photographers, and designers, is also the first BU yearbook printed entirely in color.
Customizing a yearbook is simple. Students log in, then choose a book with senior class photos or one without. Adding a personalized photo is easy — just a simple drag and drop. Every book comes with photos of clubs and general campus shots, which cannot be altered. Folders of stock photography of the campus taken by yearbook staff are available for students to use to customize their books.
Clubs and groups of friends can also create a core book, with shots of parties and memories. They can save the book, and other friends can use that as their core book and add more photos to it.
Create your yearbook here.
Amy Laskowski can be reached at amlaskow@bu.edu; follow her on Twitter @amlaskow.
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