The Digital Repository of Ireland is a major initiative to safeguard Ireland’s digital heritage across the social and cultural domains. Built by a consortium of five academic partners over a period of four years, the DRI was launched in June of 2015 with a wide variety of collections, and stands as an exemplar of cooperation and best-practice adoption because of its national cross-institutional structure, as well as its integration in the international network data repositories and e-infrastructures.
The DRI is nominated for this award on two grounds: first, for launching a significant national technical infrastructure that addresses a serious preservation gap across Irish institutions, and second, for a series of sub-projects that directly and immediately address at-risk collections of national and international interest. In terms of the digital preservation gap, DRI marks the birth of Ireland’s first national multi-domain TDR, having earned the Data Seal of Approval days after its public launch, and being the first institution in Ireland to sign up with DataCite to mint DOIs. Significant government investment had previously been made in digitisation of assets, but without any overall plan for the preservation of those assets.
DRI’s continued and careful consultation with a range of archives and content-holders across Ireland has built a community of interest in digital preservation, and a significantly enhanced
understanding of the need for preservation planning at early stages. Of course, DRI has also created a repository that follows international best practice in repository architecture, metadata creation, digitisation standards, and licencing, and this repository is now open for deposit to HSS collections across the country.
While the voices of large higher education institutions have made significant contributions to DRI’s development, importantly, DRI has also listened carefully to a wide range of organisations and groups, including small community groups run on a volunteer basis (e.g. the Dublin Dockworkers) to institutions that hold extensive collections without preservation in place (e.g. National Irish Visual Arts Library at NCAD), to digital archives that want to ensure sustainability (e.g. the Irish Qualitative Data Archive) to state-institutions that hold extensive archives but want to increase accessibility and reach (e.g. RTE and our national cultural institutions). Considering the needs of this wide swath of organisation types and sizes has been a challenge, but it is central to DRI’s ethos, and also a significant consideration in the current development of DRI’s business model and new governance structure. In addition to meeting a broad national need for digital preservation, DRI has paid careful attention to at-risk object, helping to preserve and bring to light a series of fascinating collections and artefacts that would otherwise be subject to deterioration, or be difficult for the public to access.
Leading up to its public launch in 2015, DRI initiated the ‘Decade of Centenaries; contest, which offered a ‘prize’ to three at-risk collections. The Decade of Centenaries targeted collections relevant to the founding of an independent Ireland, with a current focus on Easter Rising of 1916. The winning collections received one-on-one digital archivist assistance, metadata creation guidance, and ingest support to deposit their collections – both at-risk and of national significance – into DRI. These collections (The Michael Healy Collection, The Capuchins and the Irish Revolution, and Dublin City Electoral Lists) are featured on the front page of the repository at can be viewed on the repository at https://repository.dri.ie/
Based on this training and the publicity afforded to them, further collections are being prepared by these archives. Inspiring Ireland, DRI’s flagship digital cultural heritage platform, proved that long-term preservation and aesthetically pleasing presentation can go hand in hand. While the first phase of this project (2014-2016) worked with the collections of established national cultural institutions, in the second phase, Inspiring Ireland 1916, public collection days were held to discover, digitise and preserve personal objects from 1916. In this case, 100-year old objects that were clearly decaying in their material form, and were viewable only by their owners, have been preserved on DRI for the long term, and are now viewable by anyone with an internet connection at both inspiring-ireland.ie and in the DRI repository. In addition, DRI is at the forefront of building new capacities to meet Ireland’s data management requirements for EU mandates in open data, consulting widely with HEIs and the National Archives to develop shared services. While these initiatives seemingly diverge from DRI’s initial mandate to preserve social and cultural qualitative data, they are part of a larger strategy to embed DRI in various aspects of Irish preservation, so that more fragile (and underfunded) projects benefit from the security of a widely-adopted platform. Mitigating risk and safeguarding the digital legacy can be approached from a variety of perspectives.
- Read more: https://repository.dri.ie/