In September 2006, the Heritage Council commenced a formal study into the feasibility of establishing an All-Island Irish Archives Portal through which web users can search finding aids and collection catalogues held by a wide variety of repositories across the island of Ireland. Such portals have already been successfully deployed in many countries worldwide, including initiatives such as SCAN in Scotland and A2A in England. Following a public tender process, the Heritage Council commissioned Central Solutions and JD Consulting to assist with this work.

The first phase of the project focused on the completion of a comprehensive feasibility study to examine the technical and non-technical issues associated with the establishment of an All-Island Archives Portal, to examine similar initiatives internationally and to consult with archive providers and other stakeholders on the Island. This feasibility study was completed in early 2007 and found that in order for the Irish archives sector to remain relevant and for Irish archive materials to be leveraged for maximum benefit of the island as a whole, an Irish Archives portal should be developed as a matter of urgency. The study also found that Irish archives sector is behind its counterparts in many other European countries with respect to the adoption of such online finding aids. The study concluded that the establishment of an Irish Archives Portal would be an important step in protecting and advancing Irish culture and heritage in an ever-expanding information society. Surveys completed during the study found that there is widespread support amongst the archive profession and potential users for such an initiative and the benefits of such a portal would be significant. These benefits include:

§         Helping raise awareness amongst the general public and officials, regarding the richness of Ireland’s archival heritage, its relevance and how it presents new social and economic growth opportunities for all.

§         Improving access to archives by the general public and interested researchers.

§         Building the profile and image of the Irish archives sector at home and abroad.

§         Protecting and advancing Irish culture and heritage in a digital age

§         Enriching education and life-long learning.

§         Providing new opportunities for entrepreneurship, research and tourism.

§         Enhancing North-South cooperation and shared identity

§         Promoting standards and skills development in the sector

§         Providing an impetus to tackle the current backlog of unlisted archival materials and make it available to the public.

§         Providing a platform for international cooperation and linking up with other portals in Europe and the rest of the world, creating even greater awareness and accessibility to Irish archives.

Since completing the feasibility study in 2007, Central Solutions has continued to provide technical support to a number of activities which are helping to advance the establishment of an All-Island Irish Archives Portal. These activities include:

§         Participating in the November 2007, Society of Archivists portal workshop in Croke Park. This workshop was organised (with support from the Heritage Council) to help build awareness of the issues which must be addressed for a portal initiative to be successful and in particular to promote the development and adoption of appropriate descriptive standards by the profession in Ireland. Speakers at the event included The National Archives of Scotland, Central Solutions, Derry City Council, National Library of Ireland, UCD Archives and PRONI

§         Working with a number of individual archive providers to assist them to introduce searchable online catalogues which comply with international cataloguing and interoperability standards.

§         Working with the Heritage Council and a number of archive providers in the border region to develop a proposal for a unified cross-repository portal which would act as a pilot project for a subsequent All-Island portal.

The effort to establish an Irish Archives Portal is perhaps one of the most exciting developments regarding archives in Ireland for many years. While some significant progress has been made to-date, substantial challenges remain. The development of an All-Island Irish Archives Portal will require leadership, new funding, new competencies and the commitment of everyone involved in archives to make it become a reality. Hence it is imperative that the profession and the archive user community continue to articulate the case for an Irish Archives Portal and the benefits that will accrue from its introduction. Furthermore it is imperative that individual archive service providers adhere to national and international descriptive and interoperability standards when putting their catalogues online, thereby ensuring that they are in a position to contribute to the portal when it is introduced.

Ken Stockil
Central Solutions

Cross Border Archives Website for Down and Louth

On the 13^th June last in Louth County Archives Service an innovative cross-border website was launched by Councillor Jimmy Mulroy, Cathaoirleach of Louth Co Council and Councillor Colman Burns, Mayor of Newry & Mourne District Council. Tom French, Vice-Chairman of the EBR Interreg IIIA Partnership also spoke at the event. The website was part of a project which was part financed by the European Union through the Interreg IIIA Programme managed for the Special EU Programmes Body by the East Border Region Interreg IIIA Partnership. This exciting new website provides, for the first time, online access to the archival collections of Newry and Mourne Museum at Bagenal’s Castle and Louth County Archives Service and is a major milestone in the development of both services. In addition to an online catalogue of the archival holdings, the website features online exhibitions, educational activities, and an oral history archive section.

The address for the website is www.louthnewryarchives.ie. 

Councillor Jimmy Mulroy, Chairman of Louth Co Council said it was ‘an historic occasion as the online service meant that there now would be both local access to the archives and global reach.’ Mayor of Newry Colman Burns said the website launch will prove to be hugely important while Tom French, Vice-Chairman of the EBR Interreg IIIA Partnership, said ‘East Border Region is delighted to be able to fund innovative cross border projects such as this that show how modern technology can be used to make historic records publicly accessible. This website will be of interest to a range of user groups including the business community, schools and colleges, the public sector and the wider community as a whole.’ 

The primary objective of the project was to optimise public access to archival material held in both services that relates to the development of the Newry-Mourne – Louth cross-border. The website is the culmination of a project which commenced over a year ago, and involved the recruitment of two archivists who catalogued archival collections in both services. The collections incorporated a vast array of material on the historical development of the region including the Reside Collection in Newry which contains a wide range of highly important manuscript material including architectural plans, notebooks, leases, maps, estate records and other documentation relating to the Newry and Mourne area. In Louth, the Paddy Mallon collection – Great Northern Railway (Ireland) which contains many engineering drawings, the Roden papers which contain many documents relating to the town of Dundalk and its environs, the Macardle Moore papers which contain many legal documents relating to properties in Louth and several other counties, and a number of smaller collections were catalogued.  These collections, along-with other archival collections held in Louth County Archives Service, can now be found on the online catalogues.

Several exhibitions are featured on the website and these include two exhibitions relating to the material catalogued: one on the Great Northern Railway and one on the Reside Collection.  There is also an exhibition on Landowners in Co Louth (which is due to have a map added to it in late July), and one on Land Ownership in Newry & Mourne. Other exhibitions include Building Newry & Mourne, Incumbered Estate Court, and a joint exhibition on World War II which illustrates the effects of the war locally.

Throughout the project a number of events were held to promote the archives, ranging from Living History events to Archive Open Days. A wide range of participants attended these events including schools, members of historical groups and members of the public. To facilitate optimum access to the collections, conservation treatment was also carried out as part of the Project on a quantity of items in poor condition within the collections in order to make them accessible to researchers. The Project was completed at the end of June 2008 and collections processed are now available for viewing by appointment.  As the online catalogue is a major part of the website, it is intended that further collections will be added as they become processed.

Lorraine Buchanan
Louth County Archives Service

City Archives was selected by Shannon Broadband- a public sector consortium led by Shannon Development- as a demonstration proposal under their Digital Skies Project. The Digital Skies Project is a European funded project focusing on improving the quality and accessibility of broadband content.  Shannon Broadband (SBB) initially audited existing broadband content in the Shannon region before selecting Limerick City Archives as a partner.  Their initial audit concluded that: 

·         The status of most of the content sources was fairly raw with poor cataloguing, tagging and data preparation, which made effective online publication and searching difficult without a lot of additional work. 

·         In general there was poor awareness and adoption of standards based approaches to the online enablement of archives. Typically the online cataloguing projects that had been completed in the region tend to be purely focussed on the publication of the content within existing content management systems and have generally not addressed issues of future interoperability, portability, accessibility and open access. 

·         Awareness of emerging policies and archives management portals at a European level and at a national level was generally poor.

·         Much of the cost associated with e-enablement of archives in particular is in the markup and tagging of material to prepare it to a consistent standard before putting it online. Failing to address this upfront data preparation means the resultant online information is ineffective.

Arising from the audit it was agreed that the demonstration project should focus on the online enablement of Limerick City Archives. While there were many other worthwhile initiatives considered in the preparatory phase, it was felt that because Limerick City Archives had recently completed a large scale cataloguing project which involved updating their catalogues to international standard ISAD (G), it provided the best foundation for the demonstration. The availability of ISAD (G) compliant materials meant that the demonstration could achieve its target of being a regional and national showcase for best practice in the adoption of interoperability standards and the online publication of public sector information.

It was proposed that the primary deliverable would be EAD compliant files and that these would be maintained on an open source, standards based archives platform- ARCHON. The primary rationale for this decision was to address issues of future interoperability, portability, and accessibility particularly in light of national and international developments. The approach also supports the European Commission approach of promoting the increased use of OSS for such initiatives, an area where Ireland has lagged behind other European countries in the past.

Limerick City Archives selected a key number of collections for initial inclusion on the portal and these are now fully searchable online in EAD format based on ISAD (G) structures.  Shannon Broadband delivered all this mark up and tagging work to Limerick City Archives providing the City Archives with an excellent ‘jumpstart’ in the area.

The project has run smoothly and resulted in the completion of a full standards based eArchives portal for Limerick. The public can search the catalogue by keyword search or alphabetically by collection title. Hits are returned in their hierarchical context and a full collection list can also be printed out. Limerick is the first local authority in the country to have such a portal.  The online catalogue can be viewed at http://www.limerickcity.ie/Archives/

Jackie Hayes
Limerick City Archives

New Internet Initiative of the Irish Traditional Music Archive

A celebration to mark the 21st anniversary of the foundation of the Irish Traditional Music Archive (ITMA)/ Taisce Cheol Dúchais Éireann was held in no 73 Merrion Square, Dublin, on 29 July 2008. As one of a number of events to mark the 21st anniversary, a new internet initiative of the Archive which begins to make its unique catalogues available via the internet was launched by Dr Olive Braiden, Chair of the Arts Council/ An Chomhairle Ealaíon.

Since its foundation, the ITMA has grown from a concept and an ideal without holdings or premises to become one of the largest collections in existence of the materials of Irish traditional music – sound recordings, books, sheet music, ballad sheets, videos, photographs, press cuttings, programmes, posters, etc. – and the largest collection in existence of information on the music. It is now a national public archive and resource centre for all with an interest in the contemporary and historical art forms of Irish traditional song, instrumental music, and dance. Its collections are housed in a Georgian heritage building at 73 Merrion Square, Dublin 2, which has been restored for it by the Office of Public Works.

As well as collecting, preserving and organising Irish traditional music, the ITMA aims to make the multi-media materials and information it holds as widely available as possible to the general public, constrained only by copyright law and its own resources.  Its collections are available for reference and free of charge to visitors to its premises. An information service is provided by staff directly by phone, post and fax, and remotely through the ITMA website. Materials and information are also made available through lectures, exhibitions and publications by ITMA staff, and through ITMA’s extensive cooperation with the activities of others, including RTÉ Radio and Television, TG4 Television, The Journal of Music in Ireland, Na Píobairí Uilleann, the Ulster Folk & Transport Museum, Gael Linn, and others.

The ITMA has built up its collection by donations, large and small, from hundreds of donors, by purchase and copying of material, and by its own field collection activities.  It is funded primarily by the Arts Council in Dublin and also by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland in Belfast, and by individual donors, especially through its support group Friends of the Irish Traditional Music Archive.  It receives project funding from sponsors such as the Heritage Council, Cairde na Cruite, and the Ireland Newfoundland Partnership.

To begin the next stage of its ongoing development and outreach, and to mark its 21st anniversary, the ITMA began the public phase of a new Internet Initiative on 29 July 2008.

This Initiative is in two parts. Firstly the ITMA’s information on its holdings had been organised since 1987 on unique locally online computer catalogues, which now contain over half a million content items and are available to visitors to the Archive.  A programme has begun of making these catalogues available world-wide and free of charge on the Internet via the ITMA’s existing website www.itma.ie.  Staff have created new Internet interfaces and query screens for its databases, and have re-edited and reformatted batches of catalogue records. A first tranche of these catalogue records, representing 1,500 initial samples from many of the categories of material held, is now available.  The remaining records will be processed and made available on the Internet in two-monthly increments in the course of the coming months (for further information see www.itma.ie/Catalogues & Databases).

Secondly since the 1990s the Archive has been digitizing its vulnerable sound recordings, printed materials and visual materials, for preservation and for public access. A programme of making copyright-free selections of these digitised materials available via the ITMA website has now also begun, free of charge, and will continue in two-monthly increments.  The first items made available are cylinder sound recordings from the Irish Diaspora, recorded c. 1900 in New York by the uilleann piper Patsy Touhey; 19th- and 20th century Irish-interest ballad sheets bequeathed to the ITMA by the collector Leslie Shepard; and photographs and other images of traditional music practice which are part of an ITMA publishing cooperation with The Journal of Music in Ireland (for further information see www.itma.ie/Digitised_Materials).

In her launch of the Initiative, Dr Olive Braiden said:

I welcome the announcement of this Initiative of the Irish Traditional Music Archive, which will make available re-edited and reformatted catalogue records from its unique computerised databases world-wide through its website.  The more people who can access and be inspired by what this collection preserves, the more the talent and passion contained in those records will inform and inspire the world of today.

Nicholas Carolan
Irish Traditional Music Archive

Gloine, the database of stained glass in the Church of Ireland created by Dr David Lawrence, was launched by Dr Nicola Gordon Bowe, from the National College of Art and Design, in the Irish Architectural Archive in Dublin on 28 April 2008.

The database, which has been praised for the wonderful quality of the images as well as for the extensive scholarship and research on which it is based, is one of the outputs of the first project in the world to survey the stained glass heritage of a religious organisation. The survey, which has been funded by the Heritage Council and the Representative Church Body, covers 1357 windows in 291 churches in six dioceses, with 2650 detailed pictures of the windows themselves and 422 photographs of the buildings. Six dioceses are yet to be surveyed.

The database may be searched by the name of an architect, by studio or artist name, by location, date, religious iconography, by architectural description and even by size, shape and architectural location of the windows.

The database already represents the most extensive survey of Irish stained glass, and those interested in the history of the subject will find a great deal to interest them in the identification of Irish studios, designers and artists that were previously poorly documented or little known. In addition, as many windows were commemorative gifts, they often contain valuable information on Irish families.

Dr Lawrence, who is based in Wales, is internationally recognised for his expertise in the history of stained glass and is an accomplished photographer of stained glass windows. In addition, he is an acknowledged expert in the conservation and restoration of old glass, and his reports, which have been produced on a diocese by diocese basis are full of useful advice on this subject.

Raymond Refausse
Representative Church Body Library