The Client
The Houses of the Oireachtas is the national parliament of Ireland which consists of the President and the upper and lower houses.
The Problem
As part of its service to members, the Oireachtas provides an impartial research facility and library which is host to a large collection of historically and nationally important texts and documents.
A key part of their archives in the Dublin Castle Pamphlet Collection which ranged from 1647 to 1922. The Library and Research Service of the Houses of the Oireachtas were seeking to ensure the long term preservation of the pamphlet collection and provide digital access to users through their own web portal.
What We Did
The collection contained approximately 1,500 pamphlets bound within 168 volumes. This resulted in a total of 83,000 pages which needed to be captured.
Due to the the age of pamphlets and their delicate nature, extreme care was taken at all times to preserve the integrity of the collection. The different volumes varied in size but were generally less than A4 in page size.
The entire collection was scanned to preservation standard 300dpi TIFF with additional JPEG, watermarked PDF and GIF thumbnail derivatives also created. Additionally, all images also underwent an OCR process.
Once the collection had been digitally captured we were able to remotely process the ingestion of the data into the Oireachtas Library Management System.
The Benefits
- The collection has been digitally preserved and is protected from any future damage that may have been caused through handling
- Greater access has now been provided to the collection through the Oireachtas’ online portal
- Multiple users are able to access the collection at the same time, allowing for more varied research to be undertaken
- A digital backup has been created ensuring there will always remain a permanent record of the books in case of disaster
- Documents can be searched for using keywords and phrases