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HBCUs to Digitize Photographic Archives
16 July 2025
Tens of thousands of historical images at America's Historically Black Colleges and Universities will be digitized thanks to a $500,000 grant program initiated by Getty Images, with crucial support from Epson, Denny's and other organizations.
HBCU Archives. A box of images at North Carolina Central University.
"Our nation has a rich history and we are honored to help preserve the archives of Historically Black Colleges and Universities like Prairie View," said Haol Yao, Epson product manager.
THE PHOTOS
The goal of the program is to capture thousands of historical images from HBCUs using Epson professional archival scanners, restore them, add descriptive metadata, preserve them in the Getty Images Media Manager and share them with news media and publishers, on Getty Images' global distribution platform.
"Photographic images are very important," said Cecil Williams, director of historic preservation for Claflin University in South Carolina. "There is nothing else in the world that mimics life better. In shooting a photo, we are capturing a moment of time in a way that anyone can relate to."
The archives at Jackson State, for example, include about 55,000 images going as far back as 1865, according to archivist Darlita Ballard. These include images of the university as it grew, campus life, faculty and students, collegiate sports and the local community, as well as special collections, such as sketches by artist/illustrator Tracy Sugarman of the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer Project. "We have photos of Walter Payton and Robert Brazile when they played football here and others who became celebrities," Ballard notes.
THE GRANTS
With $500,000 from the Getty Family and the philanthropic organization Stand Together, the Getty Images Photo Archive Grants for HBCUs began in 2021 with four initial recipients before expanding the program to other HBCUs.
Denny's, with its long-standing commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion, soon joined by providing stipends for the students working on the project at each institution.
When asked to sell scanners to the program, Epson offered to donate the Expression 12000 XL, a versatile and large-format scanner designed for professional photographers, to each of the program's grant recipients instead. The scanners include SilverFast software.
The inaugural recipients are Claflin University of Orangeburg, S.C.; North Carolina Central University of Durham, N.C.; Jackson State University of Jackson, Miss.; and Prairie View A&M University of Prairie View, Tex.
THE WORK
"The scanner is critical in that the team only wants to visit an image once and forever," said Yao. "They needed a great scanner to get the best possible image on the first try and not have to go back and rescan images in the future."
For the critical post-production work, which includes retouching or restoration and the application of metadata, the team hired Adnet Global, a long-term Getty Images partner.
Adnet's Matt Flor described the challenge of the project, "Every time someone at one of the universities opens a new box of photos, they have to determine the best way to handle them. At Jackson State, for example, we found everything from turn-of-the-century contact prints to negatives in formats from 35mm to 11x14 plus color slides and even a giant panorama, which we had to unroll and scan in pieces."
While the universities do all of the scanning, Getty Images and Adnet provide on-site training for a core of students and archivists at each HBCU, who in turn have trained their successors.
The digitization process starts with students opening each archival box, examining the contents and then scanning can begin. Larger prints may be placed on the Epson scanner one at a time, but smaller prints, negatives and transparencies may be scanned in batches to fill the 12.2 x 17.2-inch scanner bed. The SilverFast software included with the Epson scanner automatically divides batched images into individual files.
"We trained the students to scan everything in color to give us a consistent baseline, look at the histogram to make sure they get a good white, black and middle point and make adjustments when they don't," Flor explained.
"Typically, the students will do two scans for each image," he adds. "The second is of historical information, which may be written on the back of a print or included in a separate note."
The students upload the scanned images to a File Transfer Protocol Web site, then technicians at Adnet download, color correct, retouch and crop them as needed in Photoshop. Then other Adnet specialists use the scanned historical information to type out metadata, update the file names and add keywords to Getty Images standards.
"If the image is pristine, the whole process at Adnet might take seven minutes," Flor explains. "The average is closer to 20 minutes, however, with some images taking far longer. Still, it's a massive task."
MORE
Epson has provided a Case Study on the project for more information.