Featured Projects

The Living Legacies 1914-18 Engagement Centre is a focal point for connecting academic and community researchers interested in how the First World War lives on in the twenty-first-century world.

The Living Legacies Engagement Centre is a UK-wide research collaboration between Queen’s University Belfast, University of Ulster, Newcastle University, Goldsmiths, University of London, National Library of Wales and National Museums Northern Ireland. The Centre is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in partnership with the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) until December 2016.

At its core is a group of academics from different UK universities all researching the enduring legacies of the First World War and whose shared expertise has potential to help community-led projects achieve greater levels of impact, outreach and engagement beyond their immediate localities.

The Centre’s researchers are interested in partnering with community-based networks and projects to explore, interpret and record the 'living legacies' of the First World War. In particular, we are interested in helping communities across the UK to:
 • tell their stories and share these stories with others;
 • rediscover the forgotten First World War heritage in our landscapes;
 • find out why and where people moved as a result of the war;
 • express stories about the conflict through drama and theatre.‌

Digitisation of calligraphic hand written documents (from 1864 to 1998), which are very old and sensitive in nature, was the scope of the project. To make the data & images electronically available for basic computerised searching was the basic solution approach taken by CMC. This initiative enabled our client become more agile and cost effective in service delivery. Proper administration of old & sensitive civil records is the major benefit here.

GRO-NI is primarily concerned with the administration of the registration of births, deaths, marriages, stillbirths, adoptions and civil partnerships GRO-NI acts as a government body that maintains & administers the civil records for entire Northern Ireland.

To extract the data according to defined business rules from the scanned images & deliver back to the client in order to enable them to secure the sensitive data from more than 100 years old calligraphic documents within very strict deadlines. To reduce cost of searching & archiving the civil data for approximately 8 million records was in the scope. Data and images needs to be ported to client system for access by different government agencies and easy access to support services presently done manually by client. Make the data and images electronically available for computerised searching.

Testimonial

I am writing to thank you most sincerely for CDDA’s services (as sub-contractor to CMC) to the General Register Office, Northern Ireland, in the successful delivery of the Digitisation Project. The efforts of CMC and CDDA which resulted in completion of the project ahead of schedule were much appreciated, especially given the complexities involved in digitising records of varying age and quality.

The replacement of the manual certificate process has made a major difference to the way GRONI works and to the level of service we can now provide to our customers. The completion of this project has also provided for the first time in Northern Ireland a full electronic index and image retrieval system of all life event records dating back to 1845.

Throughout the project I have been impressed by the professionalism, skills and expertise demonstrated by the CDDA staff in particular the Management Team, Elaine Reid, David Hardy and Anthony Anderson. At the same time, I wish to extend my gratitude to the entire CDDA Team, all of whom successfully met the many challenges associated with this project. 

T N CAVEN (DR)
Registrar General & Chief Executive