Friday 27 November 2015

New at Dúchas.ie: County Monaghan, maps and more

Areas with Schools Collection material on Dúchas.ie
Only one week on from adding the material for County Laois, it's County Monaghan that's the new kid in the Schools Collection at Dúchas.ie. Approximately 140 schools across County Monaghan took part in the scheme and 32 large volumes of material were compiled.

The Schools’ Collection is an important component of the National Folklore Collection, which is held at University College Dublin (UCD). It contains the folklore material – more than half a million pages – recorded by some 50,000 primary school pupils in the 26 counties between 1937 and 1939.

The entire collection of manuscripts, whether written in English or Irish, will be available on the free-to-view Duchas.ie by the end of next year.

In the meantime, the upload of the Monaghan material marks the half-way point of the project, with 13 counties now searchable on the site: Donegal, Dublin, Galway, Kildare, Kerry, Laois, Leitrim, Limerick, Mayo, Monaghan, Sligo, Tipperary, and Waterford.

In another new site development, stories from the Collection that included details of named locations/sites are now linked to a map and to Logainm.ie, the Placename Database of Ireland, where additional information about the place may be available. As an example, see the story about a graveyard in Adare, Co Limerick.

Dúchas.ie is the result of a partnership, established in 2012, between the National Folklore Collection (UCD), Fiontar (DCU) and the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht. The site will be of interest to a great many Irish people and to the Irish diaspora. For specialist researchers in the fields of folkloristics, local history, archaeology, genealogy, linguistics, and a range of other disciplines, dúchas.ie offers considerable research potential. The site can currently be searched by place or by person, and a search facility according to topic will be made available in the near future.