Every Irish newspaper under one digital roof

The Irish researcher is soon to be given a very useful new tool in the form of Irish Newspaper Archives, writes John Holden

The website has eight titles online at present, including Ireland's first newspaper, The Freeman's Journal, as well as present-day titles, such as the Irish Independent and many of the local and regional papers (Anglo Celt, Leitrim Observer, Meath Chronicle, Connaught Telegraph, Tuam Herald and the Sunday Independent). Within six months, 30 regional, daily and out-of-print papers from north and south will be onboard for inclusion.

Director of INA Andrew Martin has been working with microfilm for several years, but knew a digitisation of his family's library was always going to be needed. "Newspaper archives on microfilm are already understood to be a vital research tool. However, the cumbersome method of searching and retrieval has hampered their accessibility to a wider audience."

The service is already being used widely in RTÉ. Padraig O'Driscoll is presenter and reporter for RTÉ's Léargas programme. "It is a very useful tool for our programme. I would use it on two levels – in terms of the information and also in terms of layout – to look at the actual pages themselves and use them on the show. We also would use a lot of information that is not readily available, the kind of information that might only be found in local and regional newspapers."

At present, INA is the only archive of its kind for Irish news content. The other principal online archive used by all Irish media is the London Times digital archive, which has the whole of the London Times up to 1985. But what is of real interest here is Irish news.

Researcher Jane-Ann O'Connell recently completed a thesis in the Netherlands investigating the depiction of immigrants within the Irish media which involved searching the Irish Times archive back to 1996. "Had this facility been available, it would have allowed for a comprehensive comparative analysis of the Irish press at large."

Before INA, if you were unsure as to the specifics of an event – exact dates, names, places – but needed to find out about it, you would have to use the London Times archive, hopefully find the right dates and details and then go to the newspaper archives in Pearse Street in Dublin, which would be very time consuming.

Thankfully the work has now been done and such toil is no longer necessary. "We hold the majority of news titles on microfilm," says Andrew Martin. "So they were all transferred to digital media. But as the project expanded more titles got onboard and we had to go back to the old-fashioned way of retrieving information. Many local libraries supplied the missing gaps." Some other publications, like the Derry People and the Donegal News, had not been microfilmed for many years so had to be scanned from hard copies of the newspapers.

The archive works on a subscription basis: a credit is bought to view a page. The more credits you buy, the less you pay for them. One credit is a viewed open page. It is similar to the Irish Times archive, with a search engine for keywords. However, there is also the facility to look back chronologically through each paper. And unlike any other online service, it goes back to the very first publication. So the Irish Independent, for example, is serviced back to 1905. The oldest paper in the country, the Freeman's Journal, dates back to 1763.

As comprehensive as it sounds, INA is lacking two major news publications – the Irish Times and the Irish Examiner. Martin hopes that both will eventually enlist and is currently in negotiations for tender with the Irish Times.

INA is presently in trial use in all the universities in the country, and several libraries, and has proven successful so far. New titles are joining daily, the most recent being Belfast's Irish News, which dates back to 1891.

?More www.irishnewspaper archives.com