Eating the elephant, Express & Star Photograph Archive One Bite at a Time

Artsfest Artsfest 2021 / Eating the elephant, Express & Star Photograph Archive One Bite at a Time

Artsfest Online is pleased to present a talk with three representatives of the partnership which is digitising historic Black Country news photos for future generations: Heidi McIntosh Senior Archivist, Wolverhampton City Archives, Scott Knight Business Development Manager, University of Wolverhampton and Chris Leggett Director, Osborn Communications.

This talk will explore how a partnership of the Express & Star newspaper, the University of Wolverhampton, and Wolverhampton City Archives is approaching a project to digitise, catalogue, preserve and make publicly available a million photographs capturing daily life in the West Midlands over the course of the 20th century.

Heidi McIntosh

Heidi advised on the listing, packaging and cataloguing of the original photographs on the project, as well as overseeing the digitisation. She has been the City Archivist at Wolverhampton Archives since 2010, and has overseen the development of the service into an Accredited service. In addition to her 20 years of experience in the archives sector, she holds a Chartered Management Institute Diploma in Management. She also serves as a peer reviewer on the Archives Accreditation Scheme.

Chris Leggett

Chris represented the copyright holder, Britain's biggest selling regional newspaper the Express & Star, on the project from 2013 to 2019. An experienced journalist, he worked with the partners to maximise the community engagement around the archive which resulted in supportive public responses on digitisation. Now running his own public relations agency, he chaired the panel which delivered the photo website and supported the volunteers who gave hundreds of days in time to painstakingly sift through the photos, giving him the "bug" for archive projects..

Scott Knight

Scott is a Knowledge Transfer Professional who has worked in Higher Education Art, Culture, Humanities and Heritage sectors for over 20yrs. Scott joined the project from the very earliest visits to the Express & Star to view the collection in the mid to late noughties.

Find out more About the project

 

Artsfest 2021

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