UCD is creating a fully digital archive of its humanities material, from images and pamphlets to maps and sound recordings, writes Dick Ahlstrom.
Irish cultural archives move into the 21st century next month with the launch of a new digitised repository holding anything from old maps and pictures to recordings of Irish-language storytellers.
The new digital archive at University College Dublin is part of a €2 million research effort to capture fragile and difficult to access material and make it available to everyone including the curious public, states John McDonough, project manager of the Irish Virtual Research Library and Archive (IVRLA).
Funded under the HEA-controlled Programme for Research in Third Level Institutions, IVRLA is a five-year project to digitise a variety of humanities-based source material and make this available to researchers within an open environment that anyone can access, says McDonough.
The work has been under way for more than two years and version 1.0 is scheduled to go live at 4pm on Monday, September 17th. It is an "open-source repository development", he says, so those seeking access can download the software they need to get into the system and peruse the digital files. "People will be able to do this from their own browsers."
The IVRLA is part of the Humanities Institute of Ireland, within UCD. The growing archive includes a huge variety of material including text, images such as pictures and maps and sound recordings. "The IVRLA was set up to support research in the humanities," says McDonough. "The big challenge for the humanities is the area is so broad."
The project does not just involve digitising archived material, it also requires finding the best methods available to capture the source and then ensuring that anything within the archive can be found and accessed by off site users.
"The big thing we are trying to do is we know there is a wide variety of source material we have to digitise. We have to come up with methods for digitising them and storing them for long-term use," he says.
They are applying an archiving method known as Soap (scan once for all purposes). "We have scans of everything. If we have text we send it through an optical character reader." Images and sounds are scanned and archived.
This approach creates a "master" which is then used to produce scans or copies using other technologies.
"We are using modern technology to deliver this content," says McDonough. "The IVRLA project is an example of a growing number of eHumanities or digital humanities initiatives, by which I mean it utilises ICT systems to disseminate and share digital sources.
"It enables greater collaboration amongst humanities researchers by allowing these sources to be studied on line and to use new IT services to leverage research value."
The range of material to be included in the archive during the lifetime of the project includes UCD's collections of papers from Dr William Frazer, Eugene O'Curry, Michael Collins and, via collaborations, the papers of Eamon de Valera.
UCD's 19th-century pamphlet collection will be digitised as will its historic maps collection and the Beranger watercolours. Tomás Ó Criomhthain's history of the Great Blasket and the Seanchasby Seán Ó Dálaigh from the Irish dialect archive will be on the system in time as will the national folklore collection, audio recordings from the Urban Folklore Project and selected images from the National Folklore Collection.
While the material is available in its original form at UCD, it is difficult to access. It is often unavailable to researchers because it is fragile, because of limits to the time that archives may be opened or because material is poorly catalogued.
This will all change when the initial material goes live on the new IVRLA system. "We are hoping to launch it on September 17th and have a functioning initial service with improvements in the quality of the system coming after with updated services."
The digitisation of historical material is an approach taking place all around the world, says McDonough. "There is a whole move toward digital curtion where you have the talents of a multidisciplinary team."
His group includes web designers, archivists, IT specialists and others. "The project could not progress without the availability of all these skills."