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The partnership, set up by regional daily newspaper the Express and Star with WAVE, the museums, galleries, archives of Wolverhampton and the University of Wolverhampton, will make an estimated 1 million photographs dating back more than a century available to the public via an online platform.
Development funding of £59,800 has been awarded to help the partnership, which includes Black Country community group representatives, progress 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 online 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 and Star photo archive has been described as one of the most important regional photograph collections in the country, including photographs of royal visits and speeches by Prime Ministers, through to images of local ways of life which have since disappeared.
The collection includes wartime images which were not published due to government censorship and a photograph of American civil rights activist Malcolm X visiting Smethwick in 1965, 9 days before he was assassinated. Following digitisation, the original images will be transferred to Wolverhampton City Archives where they will be preserved for future generations.
Heidi McIntosh, City Archivist for WAVE, said: "We are really excited to be part of this hugely important historical project. The City Archives gets enquiries almost daily from people wanting old photographs from the Express and Star, such as pictures of a friend or relative who appeared in the newspaper.
"Unless we know which date the picture appeared, it can be very time consuming to find these images - but this project will in future enable us to track them down quickly and easily, and also provide a digital copy if required."
Express and 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.
"Thank you to all of the readers and members of the public who supported the project by taking the time to give their views on the collection's importance, either by writing in or by interacting via social media, to back the preservation of this historic collection."
Dr John Pymm, Dean of the University of Wolverhampton's Faculty of Arts, said: "It is excellent news for the partners and the wider community that this exciting archive project has won initial HLF support.
"We know that this valuable collection is a substantial historical source and a mass of regional personal stories. It documents a huge shift in the social, economic and physical landscape.
"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.
Steering group panel member Ann Eales, of Friends of Wolverhampton City Archives, said the project represented "an incredibly exciting opportunity for anyone carrying out research of the area".
She said: "Digitisation will allow for quick and easy searching and the possibility of finding pictures of local scenes, and even family members, previously found by trawling through hundreds of folders and pictures."
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 the project, ahead of a second round submission planned for 2015. If that stage is successful, digitisation work could potentially begin later that year. Anyone interested in volunteering to help with the work from then on can email chris.leggett@expressandstar.co.uk
Anyone interested in the collection can follow the Twitter account @ESPhotoArchive or "like" the Type=links;Linkid=3366;Title=Facebook;Target=_blank; page.
- released: Tuesday 10 June, 2014