Dr. Sharon Webb, Sussex Humanities Lab, University of Sussex (former DRI Requirements Analyst and Knowledge Transfer Manager DAH)

Rebecca Grant, Digital Repository of Ireland (Digital Archivist)

Preserving Ireland’s Digital Cultural Identity Towards 2116

DH201614 July 2016

The Digital Repository of Ireland is a Trusted Digital Repository for Humanities and Social Sciences Data in Ireland, launched in 2015.

The DRI links together and preserves both historical and contemporary data held by Irish organisations, providing a central internet access point and digital preservation services

http://repository.dri.ie

DPASSH2015: Shaping our Legacy:Safeguarding the Social and Cultural Record

The Irish Decade of Centenaries

Commemorating the period 1912-1922 and a series of historic events which contributed to the formation of the Irish and Northern Irish states.

Programme of events, projects, exhibitions, performances over the period, particularly focusing on 1916/2016

But how will the centenary be remembered in 2116?

DOI:10.7486/DRI.x346fc49b

The Decade of Centenaries Project: Motivations

Highlight fragility of contemporary digital collections

Outreach and education for our stakeholder organisations

Testing the guidance and workflows developed forour newly launched Repository

Provide digital preservation services for relevant collections

Community engagement - interact with new content holders and partners

What did we do?Open call for relevant collections – “An eligible collection must either be partially or fully digitised and described, and must contribute to the national narrative on the period under consideration (1912-22).”

Three winners worked with DRI Digital Archivists to prepare collections for ingestion – requirements analysis and support.

What did we do?Collections featured on the DRI homepage and launched at the DPASSH conference

Training on archival arrangement

Digital Preservation Workshop (for winners and applicants)

Findings

Major resourcing issues in Irish archives – lack of funding, staff, training, technical infrastructure.

Resourcing issues led to a bias in content that was submitted – archives had relevant content that wasn’t digitised or catalogued yet, so we couldn’t work with them.

Awareness of digital preservation, but most organisations sought digitisation services.

Although ISAD(G) descriptions were available, they couldn’t be exported to EAD (and therefore shared)

Validated DRI workflows and documentation

Next steps and future work

IRC-Funded digitisation suite available for loan to organisations wishing to digitise (including XML editor for metadata creation)

Additional training needed for our stakeholder community – digital preservation and ISAD(G)/EAD in particular

Some other initiatives are also tackling this challenge, eg. the National Library of Ireland’s Remembering 1916, Recording 2016 project

@dri_ireland@beck_grant@wsharon145

r.grant@ria.iesharon.webb@sussex.ac.uk

http://repository.dri.ie

We acknowledge the support of the Irish Research Council's New Foundations Programme.