Launch of the Irish Archive Resource

Last year I wrote about the pilot project, funded by the Heritage Council, to create an online portal allowing researchers to search for publicly available archival collections across a number of different locations on the island of Ireland. Last night, the hard work of the steering committee and the Heritage Council culminated in the launch of phase II of the project, the public launch of the website – http://www.iar.ie/

At the moment the site contains collection level descriptions of over 100 collections held by 18 different archives across Ireland, including the College's archive collections. For each collection there is a detailed description of its scope and content, and where an online catalogue is available there is a link. The collections on the site can be searched by keyword, location, repository or collection type, for example Health & Hospitals; Business Archives; Personal & Family Papers.

The Irish Archive Resource offers huge potential for researchers to find out about the range and scope of archive material available in Ireland, especially material held by smaller lesser known archives. It is still very much a developing resource, and as more archives add more descriptions the value of the resource will increase. Brian McGee, archivist at Cork City and County Archive, one of the pilot archives for the project, hopes that by the end of the year the number of repositories added descriptions to the site will reach 30.[1]


[1] http://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/online-facility-to-aid-researchers-and-amateur-sleuths-147180.html