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
[email protected]@sussex.ac.uk
http://repository.dri.ie
We acknowledge the support of the Irish Research Council's New Foundations Programme.