Dungarvan Museum has been awarded Best Publication for Visitors at the Irish Museum of the Year awards 2002. The award was made after the society was short-listed among the top five research museum websites in the world at the sixth annual Museums and the Web conference held in Boston.
The museum received the award for the innovative approach and excellent design of its website, www.dungarvanmuseum.org. “The web has allowed our small local museum to compete and win against the Irish National Museum,” said Willie Whelan, vice president Dungarvan Museum.
The Best Publication award went to the museum or gallery which, in the eyes of the judges, has issued the most appropriate book, catalogue, website, guide or other publication within the last year. Other museums short-listed for the award included The National Museum of Ireland, The National Gallery of Ireland & The Ulster Museum.
“The web proved to be an inexpensive way for us to publish 1700 pages of content while the larger institutions continue to publish expensive, albeit well produced, publications with a limited readership,” said Willie Whelan, describing how a museum with an annual budget of just EUR6000 can use the Internet to ‘punch above its weight’ in a national context.
Publication has traditionally meant bound books printed on paper and distributed via bookshops and other retail outlets. Dungarvan Museum Society has been part of this tradition for as long as it has been in existence. Aware of the costs that can be incurred in producing and distributing speciality publications, the society sought to utilise the new medium of the Internet to create and distribute its publications worldwide.
Over time the website evolved into an electronic archive of local history articles. Dungarvan Museum became its own publishing house at a cost of just EUR150 per annum, the website hosting cost. The website is effectively unlimited in size and is accessible by readers worldwide.
Despite its voluntary museum status, Dungarvan Museum has placed itself at the forefront of online history publication in Ireland. The contents of the website are broken up into seven broad categories: general information, exhibitions, artefacts, photographs, downloads, virtual tours and Desperate Haven – The Famine in Dungarvan.
Material on the site includes a 400-page history of the Famine in Dungarvan Poor Law Union, Lewis’s Topographical Dictionary describing the condition of every Parish in County Waterford in 1837 and the memoirs of officer George Lennon who commanded the West Waterford Flying Column during the War of Independence. ‘Ardmore Memory and Story’ by Siobhan Lincolns is due to be published on the museum’s website any day now.
At the moment the site has over 1700 pages on local history. The site uses text, video, photographs, virtual tours and downloads to explore many topics of local historical interest, including the Famine, the Moresby Disaster, King John’s Castle, County Waterford Men in the Great War, and the War Of Independence.
Publishing online is a cost free method for local historians to distribute articles they have written to a larger audience than would normally be available to them. New articles are added on a monthly basis. In the coming months a module will be added to the website that will make the site easier to read for the visually impaired and the colour blind.
Some 1,500 different people visit the Dungarvan Museum website every week. Putting information online has prompted many people to volunteer donations of artefacts and information. Various diaries, documents and photos that went abroad when their owners emigrated many generations ago are now being donated to the museum. The site allows the Irish Diaspora to ‘connect’ with the area their forefathers originated from in West Waterford. The Society now counts among its membership many people who live abroad and there are currently over 600 members on the museum’s free online mailing list.
The success of Dungarvan Museum’s site revolves around the content management system installed by Deise Design (www.deisedesign.com), an Internet consultancy based in Dungarvan. The directors of Deise Design, Martin and William Whelan, are both committee members of the museum society.
As their contribution to preserving the history of Waterford County they donated their software and web design expertise free of charge to the society.
2002 marks the tenth year of the Museum of the Year awards. Originally designed by the Northern Ireland Museums Council at the request of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the awards are now promoted in partnership with the Heritage Council in Kilkenny, and the Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure in Northern Ireland.
The aims of the Museum of the Year awards are to highlight and celebrate the achievements of museums and collections as they strive to care and protect our heritage, and make it as accessible to as many people as possible.
The awards are open to all museums, galleries and collections in Ireland that house permanent collections of artefacts. All such institutions are encouraged to enter the awards scheme: Large and small, officially funded or voluntary run, new and established, and covering all interests, including arts, natural history, science, archives, military and social history, and design.
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