Paper short abstract:

The NFC’s vast collection of folklore, ethnological and cultural material is being made available online, through collaboration with Fiontar, Dublin City University. This paper will examine the issues involved in such a project. Anna.Bale@ucd.ie www.duchas.ie http://www.ucd.ie/irishfolklore/en/

Paper long abstract:

Ireland's National Folklore Collection has faced many changes since its inception in 1935. In this paper the many cultural, political, linguistic and ideological reasons that led to systematic collection of oral tradition in Ireland at that time will be looked at briefly, but more importantly the current extent and composition of the archive will be examined.

The Dúchas Project - which began as a pilot project in 2013 - has undertaken the daunting task (considering the quantity and variety of the material) of creating a digital online version of the collection.

The impact of such a project on an archive, which, for the most part, had been in custodial mode and now finds itself in the throes of mass dissemination, has been intense. The day to day reality of dealing with issues such as data modelling, metadata, vocabularies, data protection, standards and interoperability etc. have made significant changes in work practices.

Other considerations are the unforeseen uses of the data once available in digital form and the interaction from the public due to online accessibility. Two supplementary projects have already been developed from the initial project, the first being a searchable index of Irish surnames and the second, a pilot crowd-sourcing project inviting users to transcribe up to 20,000 stories in Irish using software developed in-house; this tool will be used as an educational resource, both for Irish-language and for folklore studies.

This paper will outline the experience and implications of digitization on a large multifaceted institutional archive thus far.