Anniversary Gliders
Your history, searchable and connected, in time for the anniversary
We build custom archive systems for schools, colleges, and universities. Your yearbooks, newspapers, magazines, bulletins, and photos become a digital experience where alumni can explore. A full build can also take in oral histories and the stories alumni send in.
Built around the people who will visit
Before we build anything, we consider who will come to the archive and what each may be looking for. For a school or college, users often include the stakeholders below. Then the front page, the search, and the guided trails are designed around each user group.
Alumni
Find your class, your friends, and your old teams. Read what the campus paper said the week you arrived.
Alumni families
Type a grandparent’s name to see the pages it appears on. Enjoy a team photograph, a graduation photo, or a debate result.
Prospective students and parents
Discover which traditions, clubs, and buildings have lasted a century, described by the students who knew them when.
Current students
Trace the history of your own team, club, or residence hall, for a class project or just because.
Faculty and librarians
Send a class to research a decade or an event, with every page linked to its original scan.
Reporters and local historians
Check a date, find a photograph, or research a local story without waiting for an appointment in the archive.
Alumni and communications staff
Pull “this week in 1927” for the newsletter, or share a page of memories with a reunion class.
What it can do
Find a name
Type a surname and see the pages it appears on, across the yearbooks and newspapers in your archive.
On this day
The front page shows what was happening on campus on today's date, 50 or 100 years ago, with a link to the page it came from.
Browse by decade and kind of page
Narrow to “sports in the 1920s” or “buildings in the 1960s,” and see the pages side by side on a timeline.
Guided trails
Short routes that each follow one thread, such as “a century of rivalry” or how the campus grew, building by building.
Then and now
Compare this anniversary to an earlier one, using the words of the students who celebrated both.
Stories from alumni
A full build can take in memories and photographs sent for the celebration and place them beside the pages they talk about.
The search, timeline, and trails are in a public demo you can try, built from the printed history of Virginia Intermont College.
How it works
A short look, free
We look at what your institution has already published online and send you a one-page view: what is there, which years, and where the gaps are.
A paid preview, about three weeks
We build a working slice from part of your archive, so your committee can try it with real pages before deciding anything more.
The full archive
Sized to your collections and your anniversary plans. If you want, it can keep growing afterward as alumni add their own stories and photographs.
Your material, your say
Built only from material you choose to include, such as yearbooks, papers, and magazines, never from student records. Names of living people are handled with care, and anything can be taken down on request at james@gliderinnovations.com.
Who builds it
Glider Innovations designs custom systems built around an institution’s own material, and each one is made to order rather than taken off a shelf. Our founder, James Intriligator, trained in perception and cognition at Harvard (PhD), served as Professor of Innovation and Consumer Psychology at Bangor University in Wales, and spent years leading innovation groups in industry. More about us
One recent build helps an author work through boxes of research documents for a nonfiction book. Every document or piece of media is made searchable, translated where needed, and tagged on many dimensions, so that all the data inside it can be found, sorted, and compared. On each document the author picks, the system builds a page for each person and a timeline, and it flags the places where sources disagree. It is in use.
Write to james@gliderinnovations.com. A short note about your anniversary is plenty, and James will reply himself.