Tuesday, 20 June 2017

NAI to validate/correct 1901 & 1911 Irish Census data

Some excellent news today: the National Archives of Ireland is to start making wholesale corrections to its online 1901 and 1911 Irish census database.

A Request For Tenders has been published today on eTenders. It describes the contract as requiring 'validation and correction services' on these two specific collections.

Both Censuses were published on the National Archives' Genealogy website in instalments from December 2008 to August 2010. This marked a turning point for Irish genealogy, and the start of a gradual online release of many of the most important collections used by family historians. However, it was soon noted that there were some problems with missing data for several geographical areas, and especially with mis-transcriptions of names and other information, and the National Archives has not been able to deal with these issues in the interim due to a lack of resources.

The tender documents suggest the project will involve working through c20,000 user-submitted corrections over a period of about one year.

The project now out for tender is one of a number of specific short-term projects that have been identified for completion in line with the National Archives Strategic Plan 2015-2017.