Digitised Archives at the Hardiman Library

The Hardiman Research Building - Home to Archives and Special Collections

The James Hardiman Library is committed to making material from its archival and printed collections available online.  Digitisation of these unique treasures of the Library's Archival and Special Collections material opens up access to these valuable resources and allows them to be used and enjoyed by all.

By using leading technologies and expertise, digitisation is providing a preserved record of old and fragile material, thus ensuring that these resources will survive and remain accessible for scholars for long into the future. Allied to this, the digitisation of material will allow unprecedented access to material by scholars not just here on campus at the Hardiman Library but to a national and international audience, creating a global network of students and scholars of all interests and disciplines. 

Reading room for Archives and Special Collections

An overview and links to a selection of our online digital exhibitions including material from the Brendan Duddy Archive, the Huston family Archive, the Ritchie-Pickow photographic archive, the Historic University Calendars and many other collections are available here: 
http://www.library.nuigalway.ie/digitisedarchives/

For a guide to some of the digitised archival and special collections material at the Hardiman Library browse and read our online guide, with other examples of some of this material available here: http://archives.library.nuigalway.ie/Guide/

Also you can view the following information videos on the Abbey Theatre Digitisation Project and also the ongoing digitisation of the Chartlann Éamoin de Buitléar/Éamon de Buitléar Archive , two of the major digitisation projects currently ongoing at the Hardiman Library and in association with our archive and digitisation partners.

'A Digital Journey Through Irish Theatre History'

'Cartlann Éamoin de Buitléar'

O'Connell Bridge, Dublin, 1950s - Ritchie/Pickow Archive

This wonderful image of a crowded O'Connell Bridge in Dublin is part of the Ritchie-Pickow photographic archive at the James Hardiman Library, NUI Galway. The image dates to the early 1950's and is a clear scene of a bright morning on Dublin's busy main thoroughfare.

Jean Ritchie, singer, folklorist and dulcimer player was born on 8 December 1922 in Viper, Kentucky. She was the youngest of a family of 14 children, known as .The Singing Ritchies. Jean graduated from the University of Kentucky in 1946 and taught for a time. In 1952 she was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to enable her to research the origins of her family's songs in Great Britain and Ireland. Her husband George Pickow, a photographer, accompanied her and they spent approximately eighteen months recording folk songs and traditional musicians and taking photographs. The photographs include photographs of many well-known uileann pipe players, for example Seamus Ennis, Michael Reagh, the McPeake trio, Leo Rowsome; vocalists, including Elizabeth Croinin, Sarah Makem and Mary Toner and story tellers, such as Patcheen Faherty from the Aran Islands.

As well as assisting his wife in her research George Pickow also used the opportunity to do features on aspects of Irish life, Christmas celebrations with straw boys and wren boys, life on the Aran Islands, Dublin scenes, the American Ambassador and his family in Ireland, the story of St Patrick, the development of Dublin Airport, operations of the Garda Síochána at Dublin Castle, and Irish sporting activities, such as road bowling, hurling, coursing, hunting and racing. Photographs were also taken of traditional Irish crafts, for example spinning, weaving, thatching and crios and sliotar making. In a video recording made with George and Jean Pickow in the early 1990s regarding their visits to Ireland, George says that these photographic stories were for the Sunday News  in New York.

The photographic archive is comprised of one hundred and sixty seven sheets of black and white contact prints with corresponding negatives, numbering one thousand eight hundred and eighty seven photographs in total. The majority of the photographs were taken using Kodak safety film and these negatives are unfortunately not numbered so the sequence cannot be followed. The last ten sheets of photographs were taken using Eastman 5 6 super xx safety film and Ilford hypersensitive panchromatic film, these negatives are numbered. There are also one hundred and ninety prints in two sizes, 19x19 cms and 27x27 cms, of which ninety five are mounted.

To see more images from the Ritchie-Pickow Archive click here

Visit the home page of James Hardiman Library Archives at NUI Galway here

 

Digital Humanities Awards - Nominated

We here at the Archives service of the James Hardiman Library are delighted to inform all our readers and followers that our blog has been nominated in the category of 'Best DH blog, article, or short publication.' at the Digital Humanities Awards.

"Digital Humanities Awards are a new set of annual awards given in recognition of talent and expertise in the digital humanities community and are nominated and voted for entirely by the public."

You can vote for NUIG Archives blog here:  http://dhawards.org/

Voting is now open and will close on 17^th February. Your support and vote in this would be greatly appreciated! Please support our Library and it's Archives Service and help promote ongoing scholarship and discovery through these unique archival collections.

Abbey Theatre Digital Archive Partnership - Get the Facts

  

A DIGITAL JOURNEY THROUGH IRISH THEATRE
Abbey Theatre and NUI Galway Digital Archive Partnership

About the Abbey Theatre

 

·         Ireland’s National Theatre was founded by W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory in 1904.

·         Since its inception, the Abbey has played a key role in establishing who we are as a nation – by challenging, questioning and celebrating Irish-ness and Ireland.

·         The Abbey was founded to ‘bring upon the stage the deeper emotions of Ireland’. Today our mission is to create world-class theatre that reflects Irish life.

·         The Abbey has produced work by all four of Ireland’s Nobel laureates, premiering new plays by Yeats, Shaw and Heaney, while also producing several of Beckett’s works.

·         Over the past century :

Ø  616 playwrights have worked with the Abbey Theatre

Ø  Over 3,914 actors have thread the boards

Ø  70,000 characters have been brought to life

Ø  1,455 plays have been staged

Ø  600 costume and set designers have worked at the Abbey Theatre

 

About NUI Galway

 

·         Established in 1845, the National University of Ireland Galway is one of Ireland’s foremost centres of academic excellence.

·         NUI Galway has internationally-recognised research expertise in digital humanities and in Irish Theatre.

·         NUI Galway is home to an impressive collection of internationally significant archives in the fields of history, politics, theatre and literature.

·         The Archive Collection at the University’s James Hardiman Library comprises over 350 collections, dating from 1485 to the present.

 

About the abbey Archive

 

·         The Abbey Archive contains over 1.8 million items including:

 

Ø  Master programmes for over 4,300 productions 

Ø  Over 28,000 Press Cuttings

Ø  Video recordings of 430 productions

Ø  More than 6,000 scripts

Ø  600 Production posters

Ø  1,000 Production handbills

Ø  Over 16,000 photograph prints

Ø  600 Music Scores

Ø  Over 2,600 hours of audio files from the productions

Ø  6,000 pages of Minute Books

Ø  An extensive collection of costume and set designs

 

All forming part of the largest digitised theatre archive in the world.

 

About the Digitisation Project

 

·         The largest theatre digitisation project ever undertaken

 

·         133 years of Irish theatre, history, culture and society preserved for future generations (1904-2037)

 

·         Researchers, archivists and librarians at NUI Galway are applying the most advanced digital technology to Ireland’s most historic theatre archive to create a rich online collection.

 

·         It will take three years to digitise, with an estimated completion date of September 2015.

 

·         Digitisation of this historic Abbey Archive commenced on 4^th of September, 2012, in the James Hardiman Library on the NUI Galway campus.

 

·         The first phase of digital material will be available to researchers from September 2013, including collections of Master Programmes for 4,300 productions, video recordings of 430 productions, Audio Cues, Minute Books, Stage and Lighting Designs, Administrative Records and Logbooks of plays received by the Abbey.

 

·         New PhD students will be recruited and funded annually to undertake research on the digitized archive at NUI Galway.

 

·         Many more researchers and students will visit NUI Galway to view the digital Archive, while original documents will continue to be available to view at the Abbey Theatre.

 

·         It is envisaged that by 2020, the archive will have generated a substantial number of scholarly books and articles, public exhibitions, public lectures, documentaries, and new digital teaching and research resources.

·         The Archive Collection at the University’s James Hardiman Library comprises over 350 collections, dating from 1485 to the present. Theatre collections include the papers of Thomas Kilroy and the Shields Family Collection and there is a particular focus on the archives of companies such as the Druid Theatre, Taibhdhearc na Gaillimhe and the Lyric Players Theatre in Belfast

 

 
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION

www.abbeytheatre.ie 

www.nuigalway.ie

New Digital Archive Partnership between Abbey Theatre and NUIG Archives, James Hardiman Library

 

Abbey/NUI Galway launch ground-breaking digital archive partnership

A Digital Journey through Irish Theatre History, the Abbey/NUI Galway digital archive partnership, was launched today, Monday, 22 October 2012 by President Michael D. Higgins in the Abbey Theatre. It is the largest digital theatre project ever undertaken, and heralds a new era of scholarship for Irish theatre internationally.

The Abbey archive, which contains over 1.8 million items, is one of the world’s most significant archival collections. It has a wealth of extraordinary and unique material providing a fascinating insight into Irish theatre, history, culture and society. The archival material ranges from show posters, programmes, photographs, minute books to lighting plans, set and costume designs, sound cues, prompt scripts and audio files.

Celebrating the launch, Fiach MacConghail, Director of the Abbey Theatre said: “It’s been a long cherished ambition of the Abbey Theatre to preserve our archive. The digitised archive will help scholars and historians to write the history of the Abbey in greater detail. The Abbey archive is a major resource for Irish theatre and will help us celebrate the unheralded artists, actors, writers who have worked at the Abbey over the years. It will also inspire the next generation of theatre makers. We are excited to partner with NUI Galway and to have arts and science disciplines come together in this way.”

Dr Jim Browne, President of NUI Galway said: “As East meets West, and the creative arts and scholarship combine, this project will see the most advanced digital technology brought to bear on one of the country’s most historic theatre archives. This digitisation project is based on an awareness of the importance of the Abbey Theatre for the social, cultural and economic history of this country – not to mention its ongoing significance for Ireland and the international community as one of the key national theatres in the world.

“The benefits to our students and researchers of having direct access to this rich national collection will be immense. There is also great interest in the digital archive abroad and it will draw researchers of international repute to Ireland.”

The earliest item in the Abbey archive actually precedes the founding of the Abbey Theatre. It is an 1894 poster of the first production of The Land of Heart’s Desire by W.B. Yeats, which was performed at the Avenue Theatre in London and is reflective of Yeats’ ambition to present Irish theatre outside Ireland. Other archival gems reveal that Éamon De Valera trod the Abbey stage as Dr. Kelly in an amateur production of A Christmas Hamper in 1905. Even our own Irish James Bond had a presence on the Abbey stage when in 1964 Donal McCann played Seamus Bond with Angela Newman as Puísín in the Christmas pantomime Aisling as Tír na nÓg. Part of the Abbey Archive was damaged as a result of the devastating effects of the fire of 1951 and some archival artefacts are in a fragile condition due to age.

The digitised archive will change our understanding of Irish drama. The history of Irish drama is largely understood to be the history of Irish plays – of the written script. As a full multimedia archive, the digital archive will provide researchers with access to the complete range of materials associated with theatre performance: not just the scripts but also the visual materials (costume, set, and lighting designs), sound materials (music scores, sound effects), and the supporting materials (adverts, press releases, reviews).

This digitisation project which began in September, will take place over a three to four -year period. The digitisation process, which is currently taking place on the NUI Galway campus, will bring together multidisciplinary teams of the University’s researchers, students and archivists to realise this exciting project.

The digitisation project is unique in that it highlights two of the most important features of contemporary Ireland: the richness of its cultural traditions and its capacity for technological innovation. NUI Galway is ideally positioned to capitalise on those strengths, as it brings both international expertise in Irish theatre and digital humanities to the project. The Moore Institute for the Humanities and Social Studies at NUI Galway is home to several major digital humanities projects, including the EU-funded TEXTE initiative; while its Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) is the world’s largest research institute dedicated to internet technology-based research. Researchers at both of these institutes, together with archivists and librarians from the James Hardiman Library, will work together to ensure the very latest technology is used to illuminate the past.

The digital Abbey archive will be a major addition to the existing collection of literary and cultural archives at NUI Galway. The Archive Collection at the University’s James Hardiman Library comprises over 350 collections, dating from 1485 to the present. Theatre collections include the papers of Thomas Kilroy and the Shields Family Collection, featuring the Abbey actor Arthur Shields and there is a particular focus on the archives of companies such as the Druid Theatre, Taibhdhearc na Gaillimhe and the Lyric Players Theatre in Belfast. A new Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Research facility will open at the heart of the campus in 2013, providing the perfect home for this significant collection.

Students of the new undergraduate degree in Drama, Theatre and Performance at NUI Galway, as well as a new PhD programme in Irish Drama will encourage a new wave of young researchers from Ireland and abroad to come to Galway to learn about Yeats, Synge, Lady Gregory and the many other great writers associated with the Abbey. The University has also introduced two new fully-funded PhD fellowships dedicated to research in Irish Theatre to give an immediate boost to the research team working on the Archive project.

To view the Abbey Theatre/NUI Galway digital archive partnership website click here