About Us
About Us
The Irish Virtual Research Library and Archive (IVRLA) is a major digitisation and digital object management project based in University College Dublin (UCD). The project was conceived as a means to preserve elements of UCD's main repositories and increase and facilitate access to this material through the adoption of digitisation technologies.
Additionally the IVRLA undertook dedicated research into the area of interacting with and enhancing the use of digital objects in a research environment through the development of a digital repository. Research into the areas of open source technologies for digital object management, web technologies, standards in digitisation capture methods, file formats, metadata, EAD, OCR, intellectual property rights and preservation were undertaken throughout the 5 year span of the project (January 2005 to December 2009). Comprehensive reports on the findings and a technical workbook are available on this site.
The IVRLA also committed itself to creating 17 separate research projects to demonstrate the potential use of UCD holdings for scholars and the wider community. The remit of these projects was to develop additional digital research resources and to present these in the form of an exhibition collection. Some of these projects incorporated existing IVRLA material but many generated new content which was inspired by the potential of digital resources.
Output
The output from IVRLA is a rich selection of digital content representing original texts, photographs, drawings, maps, video and audio files as well as newly created comprehensive catalogues, lists and research documents. The uniqueness or rarity, and, in many cases, the fragility of original source material is a major obstacle to their availability and use by the scholarly community outside University College Dublin; within the university, their physical dispersal can be counter-productive to their effective use. Conservation and security considerations, while essential to guarantee their availability for future generations of scholars, inevitably give rise to some limitations or restrictions on use. By making the surrogate digitized version available online, scholars and the general public can now access this material without compromising the original material and can begin to uncover the vast resource that is UCD's archival holdings.
Funding
The IVRLA is a component of the Humanities Institute of Ireland (HII) and was funded by the Higher Education Authority (HEA) under the Programme for Research in Third Level Institutions (PRTLI) Cycle 3.
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The Project is based in the UCD James Joyce Library and involves close co-operation with both the library and the participating repositories.
Source Repositories
The participating repositories within UCD include:
- UCD School of Irish, Celtic Studies, Irish Folklore and Linguistics
- UCD School of History and Archives
- UCD James Joyce Library
- UCD Mícheál Ó Cléirigh Institute
- UCD School of Art History & Cultural Policy
- UCD School of Geological Sciences
IVRLA in External Repositories
ARTstor
The IVRLA are proud to be represented in ARTstor, a digital library of more than one million images in the areas of art, architecture, the humanities, and social sciences, as part of an agreement between the UCD School of Art History and Cultural Policy and ARTstor. Over 600 images, digitised from the 35mm slide collection in the UCD School of Art History and Cultural Policy, have been included in ARTstor, 200 of which were digitised by the IVRLA.
The IVRLA images available in ARTstor are from the Domestic Architecture of Georgian Dublin Collection and Civic and Ecclesiastical Architecture of Georgian Dublin Collection.
Europeana
The IVRLA are also proud to be represented in Europeana, as the first Irish content aggregator. Europeana are currently referencing 17 IVRLA collections.
Further information is available on our Europeana information page - Europeana.
