Thursday 8 February 2018

Beyond 2022: project aims to recreate the Public Record Office of Ireland before the 1922 fire

http://beyond2022.ie/An exciting new project – Beyond 2022– launches today with ambitious aims to digitally recreate the six-storey building and contents of the Public Record Office of Ireland at the time of its destruction on 30 June 1922.

The project will see the creation of a virtual reality reconstruction of the PRO. It will also assemble a complete inventory of loss and survival from the fire and serve as a vital hub to present surviving records and substitute copies identified in archives and other repositories around the world.

The team has identified ten main categories of surviving/substitute sources, as follows:
  • Survivors: records that survived almost unscathed because they were held in the Reading Room of the Public Record Office, not the Record Treasury itself
  • Salved records: records damaged by the fire, but not completely destroyed, now in varying states of conservation
  • Duplicates of original records now held in partner archives
  • Facsimile images made before 1922
  • Antiquarian transcripts
  • Printed editions
  • Certified copies
  • Published calendars summarizing the contents of the records
  • Unpublished calendars in manuscript form
  • Legal abstracts
The project, funded by the Irish Research Council, is a collaboration between Trinity College Dublin and its four archival partners: The National Archives of Ireland, The National Archives (UK), The Public Record Office of Northern Ireland and The Irish Manuscripts Commission.

The completed project will be made available on the centenary of the Four Courts fire on 30 June 2022. In the meantime, take a look around the smart website. I recommend the Work and Archive Fever pages.