Heritage Photo & Research Services
For Individuals and Family Historians
- Does an older family member have boxes of unmarked snapshots and photos? Hire HPRS to help a relative mark these photographs so the information is not lost forever. This project can be combined with an oral history session to tape record your loved one as they tell stories about the family.
- Scan family photographs onto CDs or DVDs to share with everyone in the family. Or better yet, place the images on a web page for distant relatives to share their comments.
- Are your images faded, scratched, or damaged? HPRS can scan and retouch the images to their original condition and make new prints for you.
- If you’ve inherited boxes of old and unmarked photographs, HPRS can act as a “photo detective” to help you date and perhaps identify some of the people. Internal clues such as clothing, name of the photographer, photographic process or format, or hairstyles can all help determine when the photograph was made.
- Do you need historic photographs of Indiana for a book, movie, calendar, or presentation? Contact HPRS for rates about photograph research.
For Archives, Museums, Libraries, and Historical Societies
We offer a range of photograph preservation and archives management services
- Establishing a storage system for long-term preservation
- Photograph archives assessments
- Arrangement and description of archival photograph collections
- Cataloging visual images using PastPerfect Museum Software or CONTENTdm
- Condition surveys and archival rehousing of cased images
- Digital imaging of prints and negatives
- Recommendations for in-house photo duplication services
Photograph Research
- Exhibitions
- Books and magazines
- Movies and documentaries
- Commercial display and interior decoration
Local History Research
- House and building histories
- Business histories
- Topical research (primarily in Indiana and Indianapolis)
- City directory, newspaper, and local library searches
Examples of Past Projects
- Indianapolis Then and Now book photograph selection and research
- For the Children's Sake photograph research
- Cottage Home Conservation Area Plan: Historical Significance, pages 19-24
- Indiana in Stereo: Three-Dimensional Views of the Heartland photo research and wrote essay "Capturing the Past: Stereo Photography in Indiana
- "Indianapolis Then and Now" weekly column for Historic Indianapolis
- The Magnificent Ambersons (TV 2002), photograph research for director, set-designer, and production crew
- Greensburg Wet Collodion Negatives (Greensburg-Decatur County Public Library): Cleaning, archival housing, and digitization of 175 wet collodion negatives from 1860 to 1885 discovered by roofers in an old photography studio.
- Consultant on the You Are There: Picture This exhibition at the Indiana Historical Society. This exhibit recreated the 1904 photograph studio of Charles Miner who worked in Fort Wayne, Indiana. The exhibit closed in Jan. 23, 2016
- New Albany-Floyd County Public Library Photograph Project where we scanned and cataloged 7,000 community photographs for this southern Indiana city library. Funded by a Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) Grant from the Indiana State Library/Indiana Memory Project
- Wabash County Historical Museum: Scanned and cataloged 6,000 photographs for their online catalog.
- Whitko Community Digital Image Project: The Pierceton and South Whitley Libraries, in collaboration with the Kosciusko County Historical Society, hired Heritage Photo & Research Services to scan and catalog images of this five-township community in northern Indiana. We wrote grants, acquired scanning equipment for both libraries, held scan-a-thons to copy photographs, and cataloged images to eventually be placed in the Indiana State Library's Indiana Memory database.