The Royal Irish Academy Library has received funding from the Heritage Council of Ireland – as part of the Heritage Stewardship Fund – for their project, ‘The Birds of Ireland: Curating the Richard J. Ussher Collection at the Royal Irish Academy’.
The Heritage Stewardship Fund will enable the long-term preservation, access, and discovery of material from the Ussher Bird Notes Collection through ingest into the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI).
DRI Director, Dr Lisa Griffith said:
“We are delighted to work with the RIA Library to help them digitally preserve the ‘Ussher Bird Notes Collection’ thanks to funding from The Heritage Council.
This collection will join a growing number of natural history collections that DRI preserves, ensuring that Irish researchers, ornithologists and the general public will have long term access to these digital collections.”
About the Collection
Richard J. Ussher MRIA, was a speleologist, ornithologist and the main author of Ussher & Warren, The Birds of Ireland (Dublin and London, 1900). Ussher was elected a member of the Royal Irish Academy in 1906 and bequeathed his books, papers and correspondence on natural history, cave exploration, and antiquities to the Academy.
The collection known as the ‘Ussher Bird Notes’ consists of notes and correspondence relating to the various bird species recorded in Ireland. The original calendar of the collection, compiled by P. Cuffe in 1960-61, was prepared for the web by Mr. Karl Vogelsang of the Academy library in 2003.
The RIA Library is planning a number of activities around the Ussher Bird Notes Collection in 2024 including a public lecture and display during National Heritage Week as well as a programme of archival cataloguing, digitisation and outreach. For more information and updates, please subscribe to the RIA Newsletter.
