The IVRLA project began back in 2005 as a way to educate people on the culture and history of Ireland. It is a five year project that is still going today. The collections are apart of The University College Dublin and consists of 15 different digitized groups, and is still growing. The contents range from manuscripts, photographs, paintings, audio, maps, and other documents that were kept. Many of the pieces are photographs of James Joyce and W.B. Yeats along with other famous Irish peoples, which is very interesting. The project uses the Fedora Commons open source architecture to help distribute their information and create an accessible database for their repository.
Collection Principles
The collection was digitized in order to protect the materials, in many cases, that were beginning to deteriorate with overuse and age. The digitization also began as a way to increase the amount of educational information on the country of Ireland, and through the collections they can make this information that much more accessible to many more people within the communities of Ireland and elsewhere. Some issues I have with this particular collection is that although the initial site that it is contained in is very attractive and easy to navigate, the Fedora Commons level of digitization requires an extra plug-in in order to view the images associated with the project. It is a little alienating for people studying this collection who are working from public computers that are not capable of downloading. It also is preventative due to its extra step, users may stray away if they have little scholarly interest in the materials on the site. On the other hand the images look great!
Object Characteristics
The documents were scanned and made into TIFF files and then later compressed into smaller JPEG files for view on the internet. The TIFF files were made using 24-bit color at 450 dpi. There was a backup made on DVD for each of the TIFF images created. In some cases the documents were scanned twice. When clicking on an image, you can create a border and zoom into the picture that way. It is very accurate and very well done. Once again, the use of the DjVu plugin is a little frustrating, especially since it takes up about 18mb on the hardrive.
Metadata
The metadata is very readable. It is laid out in such a way that general persons could easily identify the information that they are looking for. On the main page for each of the collections they discuss some of the reasoning behind the way they catalogued each image and where it is located in its physical form. The most interesting part of this site is that it claims to be very accepting of tagging being made by individuals, or so the site claims on its background page. There is also a bookmarking function on the site for each image for those doing some research.
Intended Audience
It seems like the audience would be the university community consisting of the faculty and student body, yet it is made explicit that the university is trying to appeal to the community as a whole, to bring Ireland together. It is a very noble project, and there is a generous amount of information contained in the collections that they have digitized. It would be nice to revisit this site in two years to see the progression of the project and to see the impact that it is making on the community.
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