Newspaper Hopes to Attract Lottery Funding For Digitisation Project

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A newspaper is hoping to attract National Lottery funding to help it with a project that would see more than 750,000 photographs digitised.

The Express & Star in Wolverhampton has built up a vast array of images in its archives dating back from the 1880s. Some of them are of nationally important events such as the beginning of the First and Second World Wars, while the others are a record of local happenings such as carnivals that will still be of gravitas to social historians.

At present, the photos are being stored in a library, but some have already started to deteriorate and the owners are keen to convert them into digital form so they can be preserved with their captions.

Heritage Lottery Fund money is being applied for to help with this, an initiative that would make all of the images free to view and is being supported by Wolverhampton University and Wolverhampton Museums and Archives.

Editorial executive at Midland News Association Tom Graham said: "The Express & Star's bid for money to preserve its photo archive is a major step towards ensuring this priceless collection is available for future generations."

The newspaper is not the only organisation to be embracing technology as a way of retaining important yet vulnerable documents for years to come. Earlier this month, it was revealed that children's charity Barnardo's is creating an enormous online photo archive with 500,000 images dating back to the 19th century.

A 15ft long shelf of boxes eight inches deep and 20 inches high had been hosting the images, but this will be impossible following a forthcoming office move, so document scanning is to be implemented to ensure their preservation.

Virtually every document can be scanned and turned into a digital format, something we have lots of experience with here at Storetec. If you are keen to start your own project, just give us a call to discuss some ideas with us.

Storetec News/Blogs."http://www.storetec.net/news-blog/newspaper-

hopes-to-attract-lottery-funding-for-digitisation-project/" Newspaper Hopes to Attract Lottery Funding For Digitisation

Project’. Aug 19, 2012. Storetec.