Probably the single most successful cultural project in the last five years in Ireland has been the project by the National Archives to digitise and make available online the 1911 census. It began in 2007, when the Dublin records went online. Antrim, Kerry and Down followed in 2008 and all the other counties became available last August. The public response has been phenomenal. Up to last January, there had been 165 million hits on the site, with 5.5 million users logged on. About 60 per cent are from the Republic, 30 per cent from the UK (including, of course, Northern Ireland which is covered in the census) and the rest from North America and continental Europe. It is hard to think of any cultural project by a public institution that has had such an impact in such a short time.
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This year, the annual release to the public of Government records under the 30-year rule had to be severely curtailed because there was simply no room for much of the new material. Some had to be retained by the Government departments in question and some was put into storage. More than 100,000 documents are now kept in a warehouse at the back of the cramped archives building in Bishop Street, Dublin. The warehouse has no proper environmental controls and the material is piled on wooden pallets, making it very difficult to access. [our emphasis].
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As well as these immediate problems, there are major long-term issues that need to be addressed. What is Government policy on the digitisation of archival records? More urgently, what is the effect of the move, in public institutions, away from paper-based records and towards e-mail? What is being done to preserve the electronic record? In the Seanad recently, Feargal Quinn stated that “the registries, which used to organise centrally the files of each department, have collapsed in Belfast as well as Dublin. It appears that over the last decade and a half, the old central registry system has broken down in the various departments.” This contention seemed to be supported by Mansergh (who, as a trained historian, actually understands this issue). He noted that “the nature of documents produced by Government are such that we are betwixt and between paper and digital information. There is a considerable unease, given that we are in the digital age, that even more records will go missing than was the case in the paper age.”
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