The James Hardiman Library at National University of Ireland, Galway, hosted a seminar on Tuesday 4 October which told the story of the Abbey Theatre Digital Archive, created by one of the largest theatre archive digitisation projects undertaken worldwide. It reflected on challenges faced, lessons learned, new opportunities and impact on academic mission, library and archives. All talks have been recorded with audio podcasts available at the following link: https://digital.library.nuigalway.ie/islandora/object/nuigalway%3Aabbeydigitalseminar
Slides from many of the presentations are available here:
http://library.nuigalway.ie/about/events/past/digitisingtheabbeytheatrearchive/
PROGRAMME
1100 Welcome and Introduction (John Cox, University Librarian, NUI Galway)
1110 A brief history of the Abbey Theatre archive (Mairéad Delaney, Archivist, Abbey Theatre)
1140 Digitising the archive (Martin Bradley, Archives Consultant, and Aisling Keane, Digital Archivist, NUI Galway Library)
1210 The Abbey Theatre Early Minute Books Project (Cillian Joy, Digital Library Developer, NUI Galway Library, and Patricia O’Beirne, Abbey Digital Archive PhD Fellow, Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance, NUI Galway)
1340 The academic impact of the Abbey Theatre Digital Archive (Professor Patrick Lonergan, Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance, NUIG)
1410 Data mining case study (Marc Mellotte, Applied Innovation Unit Lead, Insight, NUI Galway)
1430 Staging the Archive: mediating user engagement and experience (Barry Houlihan, Archivist, NUI Galway Library)
1450 The researcher experience (Christopher McCormack, Abbey Digital Archive PhD Fellow, Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance, NUIG)
1510 The transformative impact of the Abbey project on NUI Galway’s Library and Archives (John Cox, University Librarian, NUI Galway)
1530 Close