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This article was downloaded by: [New York University]On: 03 October 2014, At: 02:59Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
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IrelandCandice Kail aa Columbia University Libraries, Butler Library , New York, New York,USAPublished online: 26 Feb 2010.
To cite this article: Candice Kail (2010) Ireland, Journal of Web Librarianship, 4:1, 87-95, DOI:10.1080/19322900903547257
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Journal of Web Librarianship, 4:87–95, 2010Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 1932-2909 print / 1932-2917 onlineDOI: 10.1080/19322900903547257
GLOBAL CONNECTIONS
Ireland
CANDICE KAILColumbia University Libraries, Butler Library, New York, New York, USA
Ireland has a rich and long history. It is a land of fable and of strife, fromthe legendary warrior Fionn Mac Cumhaill (anglicized as Finn McCool) andthe god-like Tuatha De Danann to the potato famine and the more recentTroubles. In the last decade, Ireland has experienced an economic boomand assumed a new place in the political landscape via its role in the Eu-ropean Union. Ireland’s libraries work to preserve its rich cultural heritagewhile striving to provide a contemporary range of services and access points.Ireland’s museums and libraries are preserving its illuminated and other his-torical manuscripts and finding ways to digitally present and provide accessto materials related to contemporary historical events and cultural contribu-tions. Local libraries also offer unique digital contributions to the nation’s on-going preservation and resource-access efforts. This column explores someof the exhibits and online resources that offer a glimpse into both Ireland’shistory and its contemporary library services.
THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES OF IRELAND AND NATIONALLIBRARY OF IRELAND
The National Archives of Ireland (http://www.nationalarchives.ie/) and theNational Library of Ireland (http://www.nli.ie/en/homepage.aspx) provideaccess to a wealth of cultural materials. The National Archives offers infor-mation about its holdings, access to its finding aid databases, and full textof nine articles about the Archives’ holdings. Currently, it does not provideonline access to any digital collections or digitized material. The NationalLibrary, however, offers online exhibitions, images from prior physical exhi-bitions, and access to their digital library. The National Library of Ireland’sDigital Photographs collection is extensive, offering more than 20,000 items
Address correspondence to Candice Kail, Columbia University Libraries, Butler Library,535 West 114th Street, 2M05, New York, NY 10027. E-mail: [email protected]
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FIGURE 1 The homepage of the National Library of Ireland.
primarily from its glass-plate negatives collections (see Figure 1). The imagescan be searched and browsed collectively or by individual collection (threecollections are currently available). The photograph collections include land-scapes, architecture, social and political events, portraits, sports, politics, andother aspects of Irish life from 1870–1954. The National Library has providedaccompanying metadata when available and hopes to add to the descriptiveinformation. The National Library’s digital library also includes a collection ofmanuscripts digitized by and accessible via the Irish Script on Screen projectand two extensive online exhibitions, The 1916 Rising: Personalities andPerspectives and Yeats: The Life and Works of William Butler Yeats. Both on-line exhibitions are tremendous, drawing on the National Library of Ireland’sextensive holdings. Its digitized photograph collection and manuscripts arealso extremely impressive; hopefully, they will continue to add to their onlineresources.
The 1916 Rising: Personalities and Perspectives exhibit incorporates pe-riod photographs, original manuscripts, drawings, newspapers, and books(see Figure 2). The Rising was part of Ireland’s struggle to separate itselffrom the United Kingdom. The Rising took place during Easter week in1916. “Seven Irishmen proclaimed the establishment of the Irish Republic,nominating themselves as its provisional government. Together with 1,400poorly armed followers, they occupied a number of prominent buildings
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FIGURE 2 The opening screen of the 1916 Rising exhibit.
near the centre of Dublin, the General Post Office in Sackville Street . . . beingdesignated as their headquarters” (http://www.nli.ie/1916/1916 main.html,Introduction section; accessed November, 18 2009, n.p.). By the week’s end,almost 2,000 people had been killed, primarily civilians.
The information presented in this exhibit is clear, well researched, andwell written. The exhibit design is unique and relatively intuitive, and it was“born digital.” While it requires Flash and doesn’t offer an obvious way toreturn to the main site, it and the various manuscripts are also available inPDF format to ensure accessibility for users who need a screen reader oran alternative to Flash. The use of Flash does make it more challenging tocite quotations from the exhibit descriptions; however, the PDF documentsinclude all the text associated with each section and all the images anddocuments, and it is easier to cite.
Yeats: The Life and Works of William Butler Yeats is an astounding vir-tual re-creation of a current physical exhibit at the library that opened inMay 2006 and has attracted more than 100,000 visitors. The online exhibitallows users to virtually walk through the physical display and interact withthe various multimedia and print materials. The exhibit entry point allowsvisitors to locate themselves in a map of the virtual floorplan, provides
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general information about the exhibit and a description of the National Li-brary’s extensive Yeats collection, and describes the sections and interactivenature of the exhibit. It indeed feels like one is entering the physical exhibitand walking through the displays. The menu options at the bottom of thescreen allow visitors to locate themselves in the exhibit using the interactivemap, to navigate the exhibit using the Areas and Interactives menus, andto search the exhibit. The Areas menu links to all the exhibit’s sections andsubsections, and the Interactives menu links to the interactive sections ofthe exhibit. A timeline provides an overview of Yeats’ life and family his-tory, imaginatively incorporating images and descriptive text that expandsinto a larger pop-out box to offer further detail when one clicks on thetext.
Multimedia components are incorporated seamlessly, allowing visitorsto hear Yeats reading “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” and to view portions ofa documentary that incorporates commentary from scholars and contempo-rary Irish writers. The documentary segments complement the sections ofthe exhibit, providing more detail about the importance of Ireland and Irishculture in his art, Yeats’ relationships with women and how those relation-ships influenced his work and life, the role the esoteric played in his life andwork, and more.
Each display case in the exhibit can be examined by clicking the case.A clear general description of the case’s contents is provided, and userscan click on individual objects in the case to access an item descriptionand to view larger and often more extensive digital versions of the objects,texts, and images. The larger images, however, do not offer the ability tozoom, making it challenging to actually read some of the textual material.The exhibit includes manuscripts, books, art installations, drafts of Yeats’work, artwork, artifacts (such as one of his top hats and his Nobel medal),photographs, audio recordings, and more. There is a wealth of material toexplore; even though two video segments I found while wandering throughthe virtual rooms were supposed to be “coming soon,” I spent at least twohours exploring, listening, watching, and reading other parts of the exhibit.It requires broadband connectivity and Flash; I accessed the exhibit bothfrom my office and using my Internet connection at home (cable modem)and did not experience any problems. It is truly akin to visiting a museumexhibit, offering users wonderful opportunities to explore the vital creativeworld Yeats helped build and the creative contributions he made to theworld.
The Irish Script on Screen project (http://www.isos.dias.ie/english/index2.html) offers a wealth of digitized Gaelic manuscripts from twelveinstitutions, including Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin, theRoyal Irish Academy, Mount Melleray Abbey, and the National Library ofIreland. Though the manuscripts are in Gaelic and not translated, the itemdescriptions and other information about the collections are available in both
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English and Gaelic. It’s a wonderful site to explore, even for users who don’tknow Gaelic. The illuminated manuscripts are beautiful works of art, and theavailable commentary provides interesting information and contextualizesthe manuscripts. According to the description of the National Library of Ire-land manuscript collection, “The subject matter includes heroic literature, Os-sianic poetry, mythology, religion, . . . , music, astronomy, . . . , and dinnsean-chas (place-lore)” (http://www.isos.dias.ie/english/index2.html, Lyne, Ger-ard, National Library of Ireland description, accessed November 18, 2009;n.p.). The effort aims both to preserve and to provide access. The project isongoing and will hopefully expand some of the options users have whenaccessing the material, such as consistently providing detailed descriptionsof the texts. Some manuscripts have a tremendous amount of information inthe catalog description, such as the National Library of Ireland’s ManuscriptsG 5–6, which includes the Life of St. Fechin, Mac Carthaigh’s Book, Book ofRights, On the Ages of the World, and Synchronisms, with a description ofeach. There is virtually no information in the catalog description for others,and the project might benefit from opening the collection to scholars andother experts to provide comments and information about the items. Thesite is also not quite as easy to use as the National Library’s; it does not allowusers to search, only to browse, and its use of frames makes the citation ofparticular sections challenging.
OTHER IRISH MANUSCRIPT AND HISTORICAL COLLECTIONS
Additional interesting online Irish and Celtic manuscript collections are alsoavailable. CELT, the Corpus of Electronic Texts (http://www.ucc.ie/celt/index.html), is particularly robust and continues to evolve. Affiliated withUniversity College Cork, the project offers access to more than 1,000 mul-tilingual texts related to Irish literature and history. They are involved incollaborative projects with two Irish language dictionary projects via theIrish Higher Education Authority, the completion of which will enable morerobust searching of the online texts and improved access to online citationinformation. Collaborators include the University of Ulster at Coleraine andvarious departments within UCC. CELT Resources (http://www.ucc.ie/celt/links.html) offers links to a wealth of online resources, including librariesand archives, other manuscript and textual digitization projects related toIreland and Irish resources, and other more general projects. CELT’s sisterproject at UCC, the Multitext Project in Irish History (http://multitext.ucc.ie/),offers digitized, full-text modern Irish histories. These books are available toall users, but in English only. Thus far they cover five distinct periods, rang-ing from early modern Ireland (1495–1815) to Northern Ireland (1949–1993),and they plan to expand the number of publications from the current five toat least twelve.
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SPECIAL COLLECTIONS
The projects described thus far offer a window into the incredible historyand historical resources of Ireland, as well as opportunities to explore morerecent historical events and cultural treasures. Ireland’s involvement in theintellectual and cultural life of Europe and the rest of the world has also beenan important aspect of their rich intellectual and cultural heritage, illustratedthrough their tremendous educational institutions, the libraries associatedwith those institutions, and their museums.
The Chester Beatty Library is an art museum and library with the tremen-dous collection amassed by Sir Alfred Chester Beatty, including materialsrelated to international book arts and incredible art collections. The ChesterBeatty Library Web site (http://www.cbl.ie/) offers access to three remark-able image collections: East Asian, Islamic, and Western. These extensive artcollections include paintings, drawings, manuscripts, pottery, sculpture, andmore (see Figure 3).
Because of the abundance of resources available, it would be difficultto include descriptions of all the amazing digital collections and impor-tant library resources that Ireland offers. For example, the JISC Collections(http://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/catalogue/ireland eresources) provides a
FIGURE 3 The Chester Beatty Library homepage. © The Trustees of the Chester BeattyLibrary, Dublin. Printed with permission.
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“digital library of core e-resources on Ireland” that higher education institu-tions, publicly funded libraries, and research councils can offer for free viaa subscription process.
IRELAND’S LIBRARY COUNCIL
Ireland has shown its ability to adapt through some very challengingand long-lasting periods of hardship. The Irish resilience and ability tothrive is illustrated in their current provision of public library services na-tionally. An Chomhairle Leabharlanna, The Library Council (http://www.librarycouncil.ie/), is a national organization established in 1947 by the Pub-lic Libraries Act and charged with assisting local library authorities in pro-viding public library services. Its activities are varied and impressive, target-ing both library professionals and patrons. The services it offers to libraryauthorities and library professionals include a series of professional devel-opment courses, most of which are held at various libraries in Dublin andare reasonably priced. The council offers an extensive, free online reader’sadvisory course that requires 28 hours to complete and uses profession-als who have completed the course as mentors for those currently en-rolled. As the state agency for public libraries and library cooperation, it hasbuilt inclusive services for patrons, government support for library services,and bridges of cooperation among library services in Ireland and NorthernIreland.
The Library Council has created online outreach projects that are tremen-dous resources for their local patrons. Two particularly compelling projectideas include a great outreach idea generally for libraries and a tremendousdigital resource for everyone online.
The Library Council’s blog, “Library.ie,” takes an interesting approachto communicating with patrons (http://www.library.ie/weblog/). Theblog includes library-related information, including national news storiesabout libraries, a list of book clubs and reading groups in local librariesacross Ireland, and links to various types of information and services,such as government information and contact information for publiclibraries.
The Library Council’s Ask About Ireland project (http://www.askaboutireland.ie/) is a great portal for patrons and others to explore digitized con-tent from Ireland’s public libraries, use online genealogy research resources,search a cross-county digital repository that includes a wealth of digitizedlocal material and information, find libraries throughout Ireland, and accessresources related to Ireland’s environment and environmental concerns. Thefour main sections of the site are the “Reading Room,” “Learning Zone,” “Li-braries,” and “ENFO” (environmental information). The “Reading Room” and“ENFO” offer the richest materials to non-Irish users. The “Reading Room’s”
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digitized content includes collections in arts and literature, a digital book col-lection, environment and geography, history and heritage, life and society,and sports and recreation. Because these collections come from the manypublic libraries across Ireland, the items and materials are diverse and oftenfascinating. In the environment and geography section, for example, thereis a wonderful video tour of Scattery Island from the Clare County Library.There is a lot to explore in these digital collections, and the interface isintuitive, clean, and well designed.
CONCLUSION
Ireland’s rich intellectual, social, and mythical heritage combined with itsstrong tradition of intellectual and cultural institutions has allowed the nationto accumulate a wealth of cultural resources. Irish libraries and museumsmake tremendous efforts to digitally represent these rich collections. As withother digitization and preservation efforts, they are works in progress thatcontinue to evolve and grow. This is a set of resources and collections worthcontinually exploring.
IRISH LIBRARIES AND MUSEUMS WEBSITES
Many of these were consulted in researching this column.
Armagh Public Library, http://www.armaghrobinsonlibrary.org/index.aspAsk About Ireland, http://www.askaboutireland.ie/CELT Corpus of Electronic Texts, http://celt.ucc.ie/about.htmlThe Chester Beatty Library, http://www.cbl.ie/e-codices, Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland,
http://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/enIrish Museum of Modern Art, http://www.imma.ie/en/index.htmIrish Script on Screen project, http://www.isos.dias.ie/english/index2.htmlThe JISC collections,
http://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/catalogue/ireland eresources#cdThe Library Council, http://www.librarycouncil.ie/Library.ie (Library Council Blog), http://www.library.ie/weblog/Linen Hall Library, http://www.linenhall.com/index.aspThe Multitext Project in Irish History, http://crhist98.ucc.ie/tbnl/multitext/
general/National Archives of Ireland, http://www.nationalarchives.ie/National Gallery of Ireland, http://www.nationalgallery.ie/default.asp
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National Library of Ireland, http://www.nli.ie/en/homepage.aspxNational Museum of Ireland, http://www.museum.ie/en/homepage.aspxThe Royal Irish Academy, http://www.ria.ie/index.htmlTrinity College Library Dublin, http://www.tcd.ie/Library/UNESCO Archives Portal, http://www.unesco-ci.org/cgi-bin/portals/archives/
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