Dinny McGinley, Minister of State at the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht has officially launched Dúchas.ie, a new Irish folklore repository, at an event held at NovaUCD.
Dúchas.ie currently features some 64,000 pages of hand-written folklore and local history recorded in 1937-38 by Irish schoolchildren in counties Dublin, Mayo, Donegal and Waterford.
This original material, digitised for Dúchas.ie in a project funded by the Dept of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, is part of the Schools’ Manuscript Collection. This material, part of the National Folklore Collection at UCD, comprises in excess of 500,000 pages of material recorded by some 50,000 school children in over 5,000 schools in 26 participating counties.
The Minister also announced €1.75 million of new funding jointly provided by the Dept of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht and UCD for the main phase of digitising of the National Folklore Collection including the remaining Schools’ Manuscript Collection material.
The National Folklore Collection at UCD is one of the largest folklore collections in the world. The Collection comprises of roughly 2 million manuscript pages, 500,000 index cards, 12,000 hours of sound recordings, 80,000 photographs and 1,000 hours of video material.
Speaking at the launch of Dúchas.ie Minister McGinley said: “Folklore allows for fresh insights and interpretation regarding our culture… This is an innovative project bringing together the old and the new in a way which allows for long-term possibilities regarding the understanding of our tradition.
The launch of Dúhas.ie is the result of a partnership formed originally in 2012 between the National Folklore Collection, UCD, Fiontar, DCU and the Dept of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht.
The objective of the partnership is to digitise the National Folklore Collection, a major Irish cultural resource, to facilitate greater public access to it, and to establish a data management system in place for the Collection to which other material can be added in future.
Dr Ciarán Mac Murchaidh, Head of School at Fiontar, DCU, said: “Our goal is really rather simple, the dissemination of the wealth of the linguistic and literary tradition of the Irish language for the benefit of the global community. That goal sits very neatly with a key aspiration of third level research activity, which is to maximise the societal impact of what we do at the interdisciplinary, inter-institutional and international level. Dúchas.ie represents another important opportunity to further develop and enhance this aspiration in collaboration with our partners.”
The Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) is involved in an advisory role in Dúchas.ie with regard to standards and inter-operability in digital archiving.
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