SJSU Special Collections & Archives

Things to know about the yearbooks:

• La Torre was the historical name of the SJSU yearbooks.
• The library holds physical and digitized yearbooks from 1910-1965, with the exception of the 1947 yearbook which is currently available for in-person reference only. After 1965 you can reference student publications such as Sparta Life and the Spartan Daily.
• During the years documented in the yearbooks, SJSU was known as the California State Normal School (1862-1921), San Jose State Teachers College (1921-1934), and San Jose State College (1934-1974).
• Each yearbook includes a section on athletics with photographs and often text highlighting athletic teams and their achievements.

Explore the other sections of this guide:

• Sports History in the Online Archive of California
• Sports History in the Spartan Daily

The yearbooks are often, though not always, an excellent resource for finding the following:

• Team photos

• Team win/loss records

• Photographs and names of players, coaches, and other faculty

• Dates of events

• Names of departments and programs

To research the La Torre yearbooks online, open the Digital Collections webpage and click the section named Special Collections & Archives to open the list of digitized collections. Scroll down to find and open the San Jose State La Torre collection, and also get familiar with other collections that may be relevant to your research. Select a yearbook to see its contents and flip page by page or search inside the book by using the search function at the top of the view window. See below for step-by-step instructions or view video tutorials on searching the yearbooks here: https://libguides.sjsu.edu/c.php?g=230064&p=7998299 
 

1. Go to https://digitalcollections.sjsu.edu/

2. Click on "Special Collections & Archives."

3. Select “San Jose State La Torre” from the list of collections.

4. The menu on the left hand side will let you filter results by year.

5. Select a yearbook to open. Putting a keyword in the search bar will create pins on pages where your keyword appears. If you click on the pins you can jump directly to that page. You can also use the arrows to turn the pages in order.