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- Unpublished calendars in manuscript form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 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.