PROJECTS

EUROPEANA

Launched January 2019

Europeana Common Culture aims to develop a harmonised and coordinated environment for Europeana’s national aggregators, to collaborate, share resources and technical means, and agree on common recommendations and standards. Additionally, the project will improve the quality of content and metadata to increase user satisfaction. As part of the project, the Digital Repository of Ireland will develop an aggregation service for our repository platform that will allow the collections of Irish Cultural Heritage Institutes to be made visible via the Europeana platform.

RDA EU 4.0

Launched March 2018

The Digital Repository of Ireland is one of the implementers of RDA Europe 4.0, which focuses on the need for open and interoperable sharing of research data & on the need to build social, technical and cross-disciplinary links to enable such sharing on a global scale. 

Atlantic Philanthropies Archives Project

Launched August 2017

DRI is pleased to announce that it will house a digital archive of The Atlantic Philanthropies' granting activities in Ireland. This three-year project will make select research collections about the foundation’s approaches and impact across Ireland available online, and preserve them for persistent access. The project will also gather oral histories about grantee activity, and build digital exhibitions to enrich the Irish business records.

Frongoch and 1916

Launched December 2016

Frongoch & 1916: Recreating a Lost Landscape is a series of digital exhibitions commemorating the internment of Irish prisoners at the Frongoch internment camp, Wales, in the aftermath of the 1916 Easter Rising. Funded by the Reconciliation Fund of Ireland's Dept. of Foreign Affairs & Trade, the exhibitions are a collaboration between DRI and the National Libraries and National Museums of Ireland and Wales.

Inspiring Ireland 1916

Launched January 2016

Inspiring Ireland 1916 is the next phase of the multiple-award-winning cultural heritage resource Inspiring Ireland (www.inspiring-ireland.ie) It presents a brand new series of exhibitions of cultural artefacts, stories and interpretation that surround the events of 1916. Available online from January 2016, the exhibitions curate iconic national treasures alongside privately-owned memorabilia gathered at national and international collection days.

Research Data Alliance H2020 Project

Launched September 2015

RDA Europe is the European plug-in to the Research Data Alliance (RDA). The goal of RDA is to accelerate international data-driven innovation and discovery by facilitating research data sharing and exchange. This is achieved through the development, adoption, and deployment of infrastructure, policy, practice, standards, and other deliverables. The emphasis of RDA is adoption and deployment as the result of focussed, short-term effort.

RDA 3 is the third phase of RDA Europe, and DRI are funded in this phase underneath the Coordinating Support Activity (CSA) grant.

CMC LINE-UP Platform:

Linked Irish NEw mUsic Platform

Launched January 2015

The Contemporary Music Centre (CMC) is Ireland’s national promotion and resource centre for new music, supporting the work of composers throughout the Republic and Northern Ireland. The Centre is used, nationally and internationally, by performers, composers, promoters, researchers and members of the public interested in finding out more about contemporary music in Ireland.

Bringing together Insight at NUIG's excellence in Linked Data and the Digital Repository of Ireland's digital archiving expertise this research project works with CMC to produce requirements specifications for a new Collection Management System (CMS) and Linked Data discovery platform for Irish composer’s music. The CMS and Linked Data discovery platform enables the effective management and dissemination of CMC’s information and collections relating to new music in Ireland, and provides users with a rich immersive experience of Irish composers’ music, past and present.

DAH Programme

Launched 2014

The DRI is the Royal Irish Academy's co-ordinating body in Ireland's collaborative PhD program in Digital Arts and Humanities (DAH).

The DAH is a four-year (2011-2016) structured doctoral research-training programme designed to enable students to carry out research in the arts and humanities at the highest level using new media and computer technologies. The programme is  a collaboration between National University of Ireland, Galway, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Queen's University Belfast, Royal Irish Academy, Trinity College Dublin, University College Cork, and University of Ulster.

DRI contributes to the programme through knowledge transfer events, co-ordination, and support. 

MoTIF Project

Launched May 2014

The MoTIF project has created thesaurus construction guidelines and a pilot thesaurus of Irish folklore. 

Thesaurus Construction Guidelines: An introduction to Thesauri and Guidelines on their Construction are now freely available online for use in libraries and archives across the world.

The guidelines provide information on the construction of thesauri for librarians, archivists, museum professionals and other information professionals. Thesauri are vital and valuable tools in content discovery, information organisation and retrieval, activities common to all fields including cultural heritage and higher education as well as business and enterprise. These guidelines will act as a comprehensive introduction to thesauri and will give professionals the advice they need to improve their own data practices by adhering to international standards and best practice.

The pilot thesaurus of Irish folklore, also known as MoTIF, is intended to accompany the thesaurus construction guidelines and acts as an illustrative guide, providing examples throughout the guidelines as well as a sample thesaurus and demonstration of the international principles and best practices outlined in that document.

MoTIF is a collaborative project undertaken by the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) and the National Library of Ireland (NLI).

Inspiring Ireland

Launched March 2014

Inspiring Ireland is an ambitious project to share high quality images of Ireland’s treasured cultural assets in a single curated, interactive website.  The project is a collaboration between the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, the Digital Repository of Ireland, the National Library, the National Museum, the National Gallery, the National Archives, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the Crawford Art Gallery, the Chester Beatty Library and the Abbey Theatre. The project was officially launched at Stanford University on 16th March 2014.

Inspiring Ireland won 3 Ireland eGovernment awards in Jan 2015: Overall Winner, Promoting Ireland Overseas, and Open Source

Inspiring Ireland was also a finalist in the 2014 Digital Preservation Awards.

Visit the Inspiring Ireland website
See also the project video

award-badges-website.jpg

PLoT

Launched Feb 2014

Tourism is an important part of Ireland's economy. Tourists often explore an area with Walking Tours (WTs) - pre-recorded guided tours. Personalized WTs address the needs of individuals and increase the attractiveness of a city. The PLoT project develops methods to crreate personalised digital cultural heritage walking tours by building upon Insight at NUIG's excellence in Linked Data and the Digital Repository of Ireland's digital archiving expertise. The results complement a city's digital offers for tourists by providing adaptable, personalised solutions for its visitors, increase tourist satisfaction, and provide a addition for the tourism industry in Ireland and Worldwide.

The Social Repository of Ireland

Launched January 2014

This project will determine the feasibility of developing a richly annotated archive of social media responses to major events / topics of interest in Ireland, and to preserve this archive in a trusted digital repository - DRI. In addition to archiving and preservation, the study will develop practices for semi-automating the processes of annotation and archiving, enriching the data with contextual curation from archives, and assessing legal and ethical issues that arise in the preservation of social media. This project was funded under SFI's Technology Innovation Development Award scheme. The lead partner is the Digital Humanities and Journalism group at INSIGHT @ NUIG. 

Irish Record Linkage, 1864-1913

Launched December 2013

Irish Record Linkage is a project funded by the Irish Research Council, and developed in partnership with the Digital Repository of Ireland, University of Limerick and Insight at NUI Galway.

The project aims to provide a comprehensive map of infant and maternal mortality for Dublin from 1864-1913. The project will reconstruct family units and create longitudinal histories by linking records of Birth, Marriage and Death (vital registration data), generously provided by the General Register Office.

In order to link individuals, the project will create a Knowledge Platform entitled Irish Record Linkage (IRL) to enhance the research potential of individual level metadata, using best practice in Digital Archiving to facilitate the application of Linked Data technologies, and ingesting content into the Digital Repository of Ireland for long term accessibility and preservation.

The application of Linked Data technologies with state of the art digital archiving, preservation and discovery technologies will allow us to interrogate this historical Big Data.

See the Irish Records Linkage Project Website for more details

The DRI-INSIGHT RTÉ project

Launched September 2013

The Digital Repository of Ireland is taking part in an exciting project that will deliver a rich content discovery service for the RTÉ Archives - enabling wider re-use of audiovisual material in RTÉ Archives. See the DRI-INSIGHT RTÉ project webpage for more information.

Linked Logainm: Location LODer

Launched 10 September 2013 (see Press Release)

The Linked Logainm project has created a Linked Data version of the authoritative bilingual database of Irish place names logainm.ie. The new Linked Logainm dataset provides Irish place name data in a structured, computer-readable format which allows its value to be fully exploited by collaborators, web developers, computer scientists, the heritage community and information professionals.

The Location LODer demonstrator website gives an interactive introduction to the potential of the Linked Logainm concept. Linked Logainm data and a Google maps interface to allow users to explore content from a range of digital resources relating to locations across Ireland.

Linked Logainm is a collaborative project undertaken by the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI), INSIGHT @ NUIGalway (previously Digital Enterprise Research Institute DERI), Fiontar at Dublin City University, the National Library of Ireland and the Placenames Branch of the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht

DECIPHER / Storyscope

Launched January 2013

DRI, under the auspices of The Royal Irish Academy, became a partner in the FP7 project Decipher. The Decipher project is a three-year, €4.3 million Specific Targeted Research Project (STREP) supported by the European Commission. It aims to support the discovery and exploration of cultural heritage through story and narrative.

Decipher's prototype software, Storyscope, is being developed with this in mind. Using Storyscope’s workspace and tools, museum professionals and visitors can research, develop, and present stories that connect cultural objects across diverse museum collections.

You can view Storyscope concept videos and interviews with Museum Professionals on Vimeo here:
http://vimeo.com/channels/storyscope