Irish Scholarly Resources: Digitisation, Access and Context Electronic Research Resources Relating to Ireland Paul S Ell Centre for Data Digitisation and.

Irish Scholarly Resources: Digitisation, Access and Context

Electronic Research Resources Relating to IrelandPaul S EllCentre for Data Digitisation and AnalysisQueen’s University [email protected]

Summary

• Introduction

• Key strategic datasets developed by CDDA relating to Ireland

• Focus on JISC-funded Digital Library of Core Materials on Ireland – what, why, how, and then…

• Challenges and future developments

• Handover to Professor Michael Buckland

Centre for Data Digitisation and Analysis (CDDA): Background and Objectives

• Research unit based at Queen’s University Belfast with 20 staff, bespoke accommodation, and specialised data capture hardware and software

• Fully grant-funded with an income of around £7,000,000 over the last 7 years from all relevant UK academic funders

• Aims to develop strategic humanities e-resources• Aims to use these resources in its own research and publish

scholarly books and journal articles• Aims to develop methodologies that assist in the

management and interrogation of the source materials to produce new perspectives and scholarship

e-resources on Ireland we have made available

• Act of Union Virtual Library: www.actofunion.ie £250,000 from NOF-Digitisation

• Historical Hansard: www.stormontpapers.ahds.ac.uk £303,000 from AHRC• GIS e-Science: £20,000, using the Data Grid• Database of Irish Historical Statistics: £250,000• British and Irish Historical Census Project: www.histpop.org.uk, £900,000• Parliamentary Papers referring to Ireland with BOPCRIS:

www.bopcris.ac.uk £300,000• Hart Diaries Project: £25,000 ongoing• Basic Historical Geographical Information System for Ireland thanks to a

£130,000 AHRC award in October 2007.• Digital Library of Core Resources on Ireland• Various projects with UC Berkeley and the Electronic Cultural Atlas

Initiative

Act of Union Virtual Library

• Imperatives – 200th anniversary of the Act of Union, increased interest in the Act, access difficulties

• Range of disparate and rare materials

• 60,000 digital objects 1798 - 1803

• Parliamentary Papers, pamphlets, newspapers, manuscripts

• In-house solutions to cut costs – from data capture, to the development of a database driven website

• E-content better than the analogue materials – enhanced searching, one stop shop

• www.actofunion.ac.uk

The Database of Irish Historical Statistics – project aims and imperatives

• To construct a census-based relational database for the period 1821 - 1971

• To facilitate regional, national and comparative research on Ireland

• Restricted availability of published census returns

• Opportunity to further the quantitative study of Irish history

• Technological advances make possible large scale database projects

The Database of Irish Historical Statistics

• 32,934,018 data values from 1821 to 1971, and then linked to contemporary digital sources

• Mostly census data but also annual agricultural statistics, civil registration information, crime statistics . . .

• Topics include population statistics, crop and stock data, language, literacy, religion, occupations, employment, housing, emigration, industry and industrial structure, trade and commerce, wages, pauperism etc

• Outputs include a book mapping the Famine• www.qub.ac.uk/cdda/iredb/dbhme.htm

Stormont debates

• £303,330 Arts and Humanities Research Council Resource Enhancement Grant

• 90,000 pages of ‘Hansard’ from the House of Commons and the Senate from 1921 to 1973

• Full text and page image searchable by MP, place, date, subject and free text

• Will link to texts of contemporary debate www.oireachtas-debates.gov.ie and www.niassemby.gov.uk

• In the past material difficult access, difficult to use with no integrated index, failed to impact on the study of Northern Ireland, and did not address an interest in devolved government

Full-text search – the results

• IRA

• Ian Paisley

• Drunkenness

• Emigration

• Army

• Civil Service

• Irish language

• Budgets

A key strategic resource: Digital Library of Core Materials on Ireland exemplar

• £620,000 grant from JISC to digitise journals, monographs and manuscripts relating to Irish Studies and create the foundations of a digital library resource

• Initial archive of around 470,000 pages

• Up to100 journals covering 200 year period and about 400,000 pages

• 2,500 pages of manuscript

• 205 key monographs

• Machine-readable text for all journals and monographs and some manuscripts

• Detailed ‘object’ level metadata

Project Partners

• Centre for Data Digitisation and Analysis at Queen’s University Belfast has a long track record of key e-resource development

• Analogue Content Partners – Queen’s University Library, Linen Hall Library, Robinson Library, journal publishers, Royal Irish Academy

• e-Content Partners – AHDS (Centre for e-Research), CDDA, University College Dublin, Digital Humanities Observatory

• Dissemination Partner – JSTOR

• Preservation Partners – AHDS – now replaced by Expert Centre Network, JSTOR

Project Imperatives

• Access to rare resources without visiting Belfast

• Resource discovery – use of less common journals

• New, complex searching using detailed metadata and semantic searching

• Serendipity

• A one stop shop for journals – and more

• Enhanced research developing from better access

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Content Selection

• Consultation patterns from partner libraries

• Academic recommendation through a pre-project survey

• International Advisory Panel

• Site usage statistics

• Journals prepared to sign licence (or out of copyright)

Why the DLCMI project works

• Diaspora of Irish Studies• Content chosen by academics for academics• Provides basic research materials - humanities scholars not

required to change the way they work - a model suggested by the British Academy

• Critical mass: Significant body of material which will continue to be augmented – it won’t be a dead archive with new journal issues added, and new journal titles

• A fully working technical solution in place with CDDA and JSTOR including detailed metadata and reference linking, and outstanding content partners

• Sustainable business model with JSTOR with subscriptions outside Britain and Ireland and free access within

Key role of JSTOR

• JSTOR is a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to helping the scholarly community discover, use, and build upon a wide range of intellectual content

• JSTOR operates a research platform offering a high-quality interdisciplinary archive of scholarly content

• Today, there are 779 full back runs of journals online (1100 total signed)

• The archive comprises16 collections, multidisciplinary and discipline-specific

• 553 publishers, located in 26 countries, participate in JSTOR

• 50 disciplines are represented in the archive

DLCMI: Ongoing development

• Adding additional materials within the JSTOR collaboration - manuscripts and monographs now, e-publications, datasets, images, video in the future?

• Requirement of funding to demonstrate a step-change in Irish Studies research. As a result QUB will work with leading US institutions including UC Berkeley, IUPUI, Notre Dame, with RIA, and others

• Complex searching of the archive - the semantic web. Search by place, person and subject in context with UC Berkeley thanks to an NEH grant

Overall challenges for now and the future

• Interlinking QUB e-resources and then using the Data Grid to associate disparate Irish Studies resources

• The need to demonstrate advancement of an Irish Studies research agenda

• Challenge of managing the ‘data deluge’ and the implications it has for metadata and contextual searching

• Sustainability – How do we maintain what we have and build on it

• Some answers – Reference Linking with JSTOR; the Grid with ECAI; help with using material; our work with Michael Buckland and UC Berkeley

Reference linking

Reference links in the JSTOR Archive are

indicated by an arrow allowing

the user to click directly through

to the cited

article.

The citations from a 1964 article in the American

Journal of Legal History exemplify how often the content selected for the

Ireland Collection appears in the JSTOR Archive. This feature is one way that

information technology will be utilised to enhance

discoverability of these resources for scholars.

Integrating e-resources by place, context and chronology: Irish Studies Research Resources: statistics, maps, photographs, text, manuscripts, existing e-resources, websites, museum objects . . .