Ahead of a three-year celebration leading up to Alabama's 200th birthday, the state is getting an early present -- packaged in hundreds of thousands of manila envelopes, and it will take years to reveal completely what's inside.

Alabama Media Group is donating its massive collection of historical photographic negatives chronicling the people, places and events of the 20th century to the Alabama Department of Archives and History, where the images will be preserved, catalogued, digitized and made available online to the public.

Containing more than 3 million images from The Birmingham News, The Huntsville Times and Mobile's Press-Register, the collection is the largest gift of historical content received by the state archives in its 115-year history.

Most of these photo negatives have never been printed or published.

"The breadth and depth of the collection are astonishing," said ADAH director Steve Murray. "We have only begun surveying the materials, but we can already tell that this will be an unparalleled resource for students, educators and researchers studying 20th century Alabama."

The vast visual record of Alabama history covers defining periods in the American experience, such as the race to space with Huntsville's rocket program, the influence of agriculture in the Black Belt, the rapid rise of industry from Birmingham to the Port of Mobile and the turbulent journey from segregation to civil rights across the Deep South.

Pivotal milestones are interspersed with scenes from almost every aspect of life for a period spanning more than eight decades. The collection features football powerhouses, pageants, parades and presidential visits. Familiar faces in photos include celebrities, politicians, sports legends and other iconic figures such as Paul "Bear" Bryant, Martin Luther King, Harper Lee, George Wallace, Hank Aaron, Tallulah Bankhead and Charles Barkley.

Alabama Media Group president Tom Bates said the bicentennial served as the perfect time to offer this lasting gift to the people of the state.

"Having worked in recent years to digitize and publish these images in small batches on AL.com, we came to realize that a treasure of this magnitude deserves proper preservation and broad distribution," Bates said. "After touring and visiting with the staff of the state archives, we concluded this is the right place to ensure these valuable assets are a lasting part of our state's history."

No monetary payment is being made in exchange for the collection, which will be managed by professional archivists in Montgomery. As newly digitized images and a searchable index gradually come online for public use, Alabama Media Group and AL.com will receive digital copies for use in its storytelling in print, online and on video.

Kicking off the bicentennial

The donation comes at a time when the state archives is committing additional resources to the digitization of its collections to prepare for a three-year celebration of Alabama's bicentennial culminating in 2019.

Alabama Media Group's ongoing series, AL.com Vintage, has published hundreds of visual stories from the collection, allowing readers to rediscover the archives with suggestions for topics of interest and to help in identifying lost stories. The deal with the state archives is expected to increase the ability for more multimedia storytelling, said AMG's Vice President of Content, Michelle Holmes.

Finding new and innovative ways to tell stories of our past is an important role for modern journalists, Holmes said. "We're proud to share the images of hundreds of talented photographers who worked tirelessly to document this state, day by day, year by year; and we're thrilled that this partnership will make it possible for more of these important images to be seen and shared across a variety of platforms and to be preserved for use on technologies not yet invented."

Organized chronologically, the steel-gray filing cabinets that have stored the negatives for decades are time machines. The earliest images, chemically fixed to glass plates, are from the 1920s. Rare color transparencies date back to the early 1960s. The collection of negatives starts with a few thousand images from the 1930s and '40s and grows each decade through the end of the 20th century.

The majority of the images are from The Birmingham News, which covered stories across Alabama and into Mississippi over the years. Photo negatives from the Press-Register are concentrated in the latter decades. The Huntsville Times' portion is smaller and more narrowly focused on sports and features. Some images from other publications, including the defunct Birmingham Post-Herald and predecessors, became part of the collection over time.

Preserving the past for the future

Before digital cameras, photo editors looked through film strips on a light box to pick and print the best shots. A selected few images were published in newspapers and then filed away with the outtakes, most of which have not been seen since.

As a result, much of what exists in the collection is unknown, and the knowledge of what's in the images is fading fast.

The years also have been unforgiving to the physical media.

The first thing a visitor notices when entering the cool, dark room where the newspapers' negatives have been stored is the unmistakable smell of vinegar.

As acetate film decays, it shrinks, loses flexibility, curls and wraps in what's known as "vinegar syndrome." The pungent aroma is an archivist's worst nightmare.

Its causes are inherent in the chemical nature of the plastic, and its progress is accelerated by storage conditions, according to the National Film Preservation Foundation.

Once vinegar syndrome sets in, the remaining life of the film is short because the process speeds up as it goes along. The ADAH says it will separate those negatives from the bulk of the collection and store them in a freezer to slow deterioration.

Work to organize, scan and present the images online will begin in the next few months and likely last for years, Murray said. The initial phase will involve capturing the handwritten or typed information on envelopes describing the negatives they contain.

"Building a database of the information recorded about the assignment by the photographers is the first step toward creating a useful research tool," Murray said. The first phase of work is expected to last through mid-2017.

Once scanning of the negatives begins, new content will be uploaded regularly to a special Alabama Media Group section on the state archives' site, which currently contains more than 195,000 digital items.

There will be no charge to browse the collection online. Not-for-profit or educational uses will not require a fee, but permission for any use must be received in writing from ADAH. Commercial use of an image is subject to a reproduction rights fee and permission granted in writing by the ADAH.

Permission forms and instructions will be available at the Alabama Media Group Collection page when the collection is open for reference and use next year.

For more information, see answers to Frequently Asked Questions about the collection and the donation at alabamamediagroup.com/archives.