RCPI Heritage Centre joins Letters of 1916 Project
RCPI’s Heritage Centre is delighted
to announce that we will be taking part in the Letters of 1916 Project. This exciting
project was set up by Prof Susan Schreibman of Maynooth
University, in 2013, as part of the 1916 centenary celebrations. The Letters of 1916 project is an online collaborative
archive, which encourages individuals and institutions to upload letters
written in, or about, Ireland during 1916.
The project is looking to collect letters
for the period November 1915 to October 1916, on any subject, to give new
insights into this year in Irish history. Anyone can get involved by uploading letters, or
volunteering to transcribe letters already on the website. The Heritage Centre has a
large quantity of official and personal letters from the period covered by this
project, and over the next couple of months we will upload these to the 1916Letters site.
For us, the first stage is to
identify the relevant letter, starting with those in the College’s extensive
correspondence files; 28 boxes in total covering the years 1796 to 1964. Each of
the individual correspondence files cover a number of years, and the letters
from 1916 fall into two files covering the period 1914 to 1917. These files are
already catalogued to file level, but we are taking this opportunity to
catalogue each letter in detail. At the end of this process we will have a
detailed view into the main concerns of the College during this four year period.
There will be improved public access to this part of our archive, though the newly
created archive catalogue records, and, through the Letters of 1916 Project
website.
The
project is both an interesting, and, challenging one. I feel like I’m stepping
back into a period of time, where people communicated differently via
telegrams, and letters. (And the handwriting can be a real challenge at times!). This will be the first in a series of blog
posts to accompany the project, giving details of our progress and highlighting
some of the unique or quirky finds.
Ruth McCann
Library Intern