A million snapshots of history - Express & Star photographic archive gets lottery backing
The bid to save the Express & Star's archive of historic photographs has taken a massive step forward by winning a grant worth nearly £60,000 from the Heritage Lottery Fund.
Britain's biggest selling regional newspaper is working with leading local organisations to digitise up to one million photographs dating back more than a century in order to make them available to the public for free online.
The partnership, set up with the University of Wolverhampton and WAVE: the museums, galleries, archives of Wolverhampton, has been awarded development funding of £59,800 from the Lottery board.
The panel behind the project, which includes Black Country community group representatives, will use the money to develop their plans to apply for a full grant at a later date.
The project aims to carry out vital archiving work, digitise the collection and make the photographs available through a single web portal, allowing free on-line public access to the unrivalled images of local events, momentous and everyday, for the first time.
Educational and community programmes will also be established to allow local people to use the collection to make sense of their heritage and history.
The Express & Star photo archive has been described as one of the most important regional photograph collections in the country.
Following digitisation, the original images will be transferred to Wolverhampton City Archives where they will be preserved for future generations.
Express & Star editor Keith Harrison said: "We are delighted that the Heritage Lottery Fund has supported our partnership with the University of Wolverhampton, WAVE and local community groups.
"Many of these photographs are deteriorating with time, so it is excellent news that they will be preserved digitally to be searched, free of charge, by the general public."
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Dr John Pymm, Dean of the University of Wolverhampton's Faculty of Arts, said the archive offered "a mass of regional personal stories".
He said: "Making the archive available will give thousands of people access to a unique record of the history of the Black Country."
The University will be managing the grant and the digitisation work.
Heidi McIntosh, City Archivist for WAVE, said: "We are really excited to be part of this hugely important historical project."
Reyahn King, Head of Heritage Lottery Fund West Midlands, said: "This extensive archive contains a very comprehensive visual history of Wolverhampton. We look forward to receiving the detailed plans for making this collection widely available."
Work will now begin on developing plans for the project, ahead of a second round submission planned for 2015. If that stage is successful, digitisation work could potentially begin later that year.
