2020-2021

The development of a sustainable archive and portal to digital content created as part of the WW1 Engagement Centres’, the activities of engagement-centre sponsored WW1 community projects, and through HLF-funded Centenary community projects, is at the heart of this proposal.  Harnessing and sustaining ‘new knowledge’ generated by WW1 Centenary community projects, this cross-cutting and cross-Centre initiative will focus on development strategies relevant especially to young people – the born-digital generation – as well as foster greater inter-generational sharing of digital resources often created in the first instance by older people through HLF-funded and other centenary community projects. Key Aims:

1. create a digital infrastructure for sharing and integrating digital content from the community’s engagement with the Centenary of WW1;
2. connect digital content from HLF-funded community projects and EC co-production projects and outputs;
3. provide a publically-accessible and sustainable resource for maintaining the ‘digital memories’ of the Centenary itself for future generations.

To achieve these aims the provision of a sustainable and substantial archive and portal to the digital resources created through HLF-funded activities is required. These projects have produced a plethora of different computerised data covering an extremely diverse range of topics. By their nature many community groups are transitory and this means that the critical building blocks of knowledge, understanding and cross-generational intercourse are at risk. New digital data comprising images, texts, sound and film are all products of the Centenary. Put simply without preserving the base datasets deriving from these Centenary community engagements, we cannot build on the legacy of this work, and the worst-case scenario is that the content itself will be lost.

Please see link for full website http://ww1digitalportal.org.uk/

The Inniskillings Museum is an accredited museum and a registered charity located at Enniskillen Castle in County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland. The museum has an extensive collection relating to the two Inniskilling regiments raised in 1688 - the Royal Inniskillings Fusiliers and the 5th Royal Inniskilling Dragoon Guards. The museum collection comprises more than 30,000 artefacts and 150,000 paper and print archives from all around the world.

This project will aim to create and deliver digital representations of irreplaceable historical documents, letters, diaries, maps and photographs relating to the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, in order to improve access to, and foster a greater understanding of, the materials held in the museum’s archives. The pre-1900 archives are at greatest risk primarily due to their age, but also due to their use and storage over the past decades, and it is this collection of unique and irreplaceable documents that Access Inniskillings will focus on.

Project Outputs

• Digitisation of all pre-1900 paper, print and photographic archives.
• Successful protection and storage of the original archives.
• Increased numbers of visitors accessing the museum library & archive suite to view the digitised archives.
• New online visitors accessing the digitised archives.
• Increased numbers of cross-community organisations in County Fermanagh engaging with the Inniskillings Museum annually as a direct result of this project.
• Post regular updates to the museum Twitter account on the progress of the project.
• Publish an online Story Map with links to digital facsimiles of original archives relating to the Fermanagh Light Infantry recruits and their homes between 1853 and 1865.
• Deliver 2 community engagement events per annum showcasing a behind-the-scenes look at the ongoing preservation and digitisation of the museum archives.
• Prepare and launch an online exhibition focusing on the preservation and digitisation of the museum archives.
• Prepare and launch 2 online exhibitions focusing on archives from the Battle of Waterloo and the Crimean War.
• Increase the number of new volunteers enlisted at the Inniskillings Museum through LELP.
• Provide training for museum volunteers to deliver Access Inniskillings.
• Create a dedicated workspace with an overhead cradle scanner for future digitisation of newly acquired archives by museum staff and volunteers.
• Increase in volunteer hours engaged with Access Inniskillings.

Please click here to vist the project website.

The Heritage Hub is an initiative that forms part of the University's 'Engaged Research' strategy and programme. 

The aim of the Hub is to connect external heritage groups, organisations and bodies to university-based researchers, both at Queen's as well as more widely across the university and HE sector, within Northern Ireland, the UK, Ireland and beyond.  

Bridging across Faculty structures and disciplines, the Heritage Hub welcomes all to share our experiences and expertise of heritage research practice and projects, through workshops, events, outreach, training, for mutual benefit, promoting a common belief in 'heritage for all'. 

The Heritage Hub is an initiative that forms part of the University's 'Engaged Research' strategy and programme. 

The aim of the Hub is to connect external heritage groups, organisations and bodies to university-based researchers, both at Queen's as well as more widely across the university and HE sector, within Northern Ireland, the UK, Ireland and beyond.  

Bridging across Faculty structures and disciplines, the Heritage Hub welcomes all to share our experiences and expertise of heritage research practice and projects, through workshops, events, outreach, training, for mutual benefit, promoting a common belief in 'heritage for all'. 

The Heritage Hub @ QUB is the point of contact for all from the wider community interested in how the past lives on today. This invitation is all-encompassing, for community groups, individuals, as well as policy-makers and professionals across the heritage sector, spanning cultural, natural and built heritage. 

At the core of Heritage Hub is a group of like-minded researchers from different subjects and disciplines at Queen's, whose interests in heritage are reflected in our Hub's six themes. Each of the themes has a pair of academic leads, and each is open to all those wishing to get involved with our Hub's networks, events and projects. 

The Hub is coordinated by Professor Keith Lilley, and the Hub themes are coordinated by Dr Leonie Hannan, Professor Audrey Horning, Dr M. Satish Kumar, Dr Agustina Martire, Dr Will Megarry, and Dr Olwen Purdue. 

All too often the opinions of young people are ignored when decisions are made about many of the issues involving them.

However, the Young Life and Times Survey gives young people the chance to tell us about their experiences of school, and their views on politics, sectarianism and other social issues.

By inviting respondents to suggest topics for the next year's survey, we make sure that the issues covered are relevant to the lives of young people in Northern Ireland today.

From 1998 to 2000, Young Life and Times sought the views of all 12 to 17 year olds living in the same household as respondent to the Northern Ireland Life and Times survey.

However, in 2003, the aims and methodology of the survey were changed. From 2003 onwards, Young Life and Times will record the attitudes of 16 year olds only. Further details can be found in the technical notes of the survey.

Questions within the survey are grouped into modules. The range of modules varies from year to year.

Whether you are at school or at college, work in the media, government or voluntary sector, or whether you are just interested in what the people of Northern Ireland think about the issues of the day, we hope you find something useful in this web-site. Browse the web-site and find out.

Testimonial

‘I direct Young Life and Times (YLT) – an annual postal attitude survey of 16 year olds. It is in its 13th year now, which makes it one of the longest running surveys of this nature in the UK and Ireland. CDDA has been contracted to undertake the survey data digitisation for YLT for the last two years – a task which had previous been undertaken by contractors in England. YLT really benefitted from moving data digitisation and input to CDDA. Not only provide they a high data quality, follow a rigorous protocol in terms of data security and have local knowledge which improves data accuracy, but the close proximity of CDDA also meant that we saved time and any queries could be resolved face-to-face very quickly.’

Dirk Schubotz (YLT Director)

Heritage NI is for all those interested in exploring the past through getting involved in heritage events and programmes, festivals and outreach activities across Northern Ireland and beyond.

14 million birth records, 4 million marriage records and 11 million death records will be processed by the Digitising Scotland project

The University of Edinburgh Longitudinal Study Centre – Scotland (LSCS) has received funding from the ESRC to create a multidisciplinary research database from historical vital events records. The Digitising Scotland (DS) project will digitise up to 24 million Scottish vital events record images (births, marriages and deaths) since 1856. This will allow research access to individual-level information on some 18 million individuals – a large proportion of those who have lived in Scotland since 1856. At the moment these records are kept as indexed images accessible from Scotland’s People, but this means that to extract data for research projects a researcher must first search for an individual record by name, and then manually transcribe the information they need themselves (eg cause of death, occupation, etc). This has made any large-scale research project impossible – a situation that the Digitising Scotland project will change.

Work Packages

The project contains 4 work packages:

1. Digitising birth, marriages and death vital events records from 1856 to 1973. - COMPLETED
2. Standardising and coding occupation descriptions to the Historical International Standard Classification of Occupations (HISCO). - ONGOING
3. Standardising and coding all deaths to the International Classification of Disease – 10 (ICD-10).- ONGOING
4. Linking address information to consistent geographies through time.

For further information please visit :- http://www.lscs.ac.uk/projects/digitising-scotland/

Digitising Scotland,
A SMARTS Way Forward:- https://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/NBE/Research/Impact/

To help ensure this legacy continues for years to come, the digital materials from 50 community-led Centenary projects from across the United Kingdom are brought together here as a searchable and sustainable web-resource.

Thanks to the funding received from the National Lottery Heritage Fund (NLHF) between 2014 and 2018, community Centenary projects created an unprecedented volume of digital content, from scans of photographs and letters, through to web-sites and databases. With the end of the Centenary of the War the risk posed to all this content is grave, so this WWI Community Platform will help secure a future to these digital legacies. The Platform enables users to freely access digital materials from these NLHF funded projects, and continue to explore the social and cultural impacts of the First World War though the efforts of community researchers.

In collaboration with the project team CDDA will support three identified aspects of the Cardinal Ó Fiaich Library & Archive that reflect the role of and impact on the Catholic church, of the events of 1921 (Government of Ireland Act/Partition/Establishment of the Northern Ireland state) The collections span a period from c1890 -1940 and are comprised of the papers of Cardinals Logue, O'Donnell and MacRory. 
 
The underlying concept is to demonstrate the variety of experience and approach through the documentary legacy of each archbishop and it is planned to have a general introductory essay for the collection as well as one each for the three sub-collections penned by a well-regarded academic to provide context.