A message from the Digital Repository of Ireland during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Dear DRI members and community,
As with all organisations at the moment, we are in the process of rearranging our working practices to observe social distancing and play our part in flattening the curve.
Because DRI is a digitally-driven organisation, this process so far has been quite smooth, with staff working from home, and internal meetings shifting online. We would like to assure our members and community that plans are in place to manage server uptime and assure continued repository maintenance. Some delays may occur, and we appreciate your understanding if they do.
However, it is also very clear that in addition to providing digital archiving and preservation services, one of our primary functions is to operate as a community hub for networking and best-practice. Workshops, conferences, hands-on training, speaker events, face to face meetings, and participation in wider networks sit at the heart of DRI as an organisation, so throughout this period we will be determining how best to keep these functions moving along. Some activities and events can easily (or creatively) move online, others are best to hold off until we can physically come together again. For example, we were planning for a spring Member’s Forum, which is foremost about bringing people together in a room, so we are postponing that to the Autumn.
In short, DRI is open and continues to provide all membership services, and to make collections available to the public. This in fact is a great time to browse the repository! For teachers heroically trying to shift their curriculum online, researchers facing closed libraries and archives, or parents desperately seeking constructive distraction for their little digital natives, take a browse: https://repository.dri.ie/ You could also use this handy summary published last year when DRI hit 50 collections: https://www.dri.ie/dri-50-collections.
But mostly, we send our best wishes to everyone in our community during this unprecedented and unpredictable global historical moment.
In health and hope,
The DRI team
Image from the ‘Local Communities’ collection by the National Museum of Ireland in the Arts and Culture in Education Research Repository collection. Citation: National Museum of Ireland. Local Communities, Digital Repository of Ireland [Distributor], Arts and Culture in Education Research Repository [Depositing Institution], https://doi.org/10.7486/DRI.c534v788g. Licence: CC-BY-NC-ND.
