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A global studies task has the catalogue of public archives destroyed in the Irish Civil War for reconstruction.
By Ed O’Loughlin
Report from Dublin
In the first pitched war of the Civil War that swept through newly independent Ireland, seven centuries of history burned.
On June 30, 1922, forces for and against an agreement with Britain, the former colonial ruler of Ireland, had been fighting for 3 days around Dublin’s main court complex. The National Public Records Office was a component of the complex, and it stalled that day. in a colossal explosion. The explosion and resulting fire destroyed state secrets, parish registers, land titles, tax receipts, legal documents, monetary data, census results, and much more, dating back to the Middle Ages.
“It’s a catastrophe,” said Peter Crooks, a medieval historian at Trinity College Dublin. “This happened just after the First World War, when across Europe, new states, such as Ireland, were emerging from old empires. Everyone was looking to reclaim and celebrate their own history and culture, and now Ireland had just lost its own centre.
But he wasn’t lost forever. Over the past seven years, a team of historians, librarians and IT experts discovered at Trinity have located duplicates of a quarter of a million pages of those lost documents in forgotten volumes stored in remote libraries and archives, adding several in the United States. The team then creates virtual copies of all the documents discovered for inclusion in Ireland’s Virtual Record Treasury, an online reconstruction of the archive. Still in the making, the project claims that its online page has garnered more than two million visits in less than two years.
Funded by the Irish government as part of commemorations of a century of independence, the Virtual Treasure is based partly on modern technologies (virtual imagery, online networking, artificial intelligence language models, and the development of virtual indexes of archives around the world), but also on dusty printed catalogues and old-school human contact. The key to entrepreneurship is a book, “A Guide to Documents Filed at Ireland’s Public Records Office,” published three years before the fire by the office’s lead archivist, Herbert Wood.
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