Ms Fiona Ross:

Senator Mac Conghail sensed my frustration. The good news on the Catholic parish registers at the National Library is that we have made a digital copy of them, which we did for preservation and conservation reasons at a minimum so that there is a backup copy to the microfilm. Microfilm is a 20th-century access format. The format that should be used in the 21st century is digitised online content.

To answer both questions at the same time, the digital images of Catholic parish registers are not indexed. We have the images in a digital format but they need to be indexed and then put into a database. In simple terms, what would make that happen is if a few members of staff - which I do not have - or an allocated number of staff could prioritise this project within the National Library.

I am quite creative and have come up with ideas in the past. However, the National Library is a growing deposit library and must deal with other collections. We have stalled in progressing the Catholic registers but they are ready to go. We just need to prime the pump in a modest way to get over the line.

We are completely agonistic on whether it is done through a commercial or philanthropic arrangement. Our absolute desire, having gone as far as the digital image, is to make them available for free. We will work with the Department and other parties to come up with a model that will work. In the past, the National Library went to tender for several of our large collections, namely the newspaper collection and the photographic archive consisting of 5 million photographs. We withdrew from tendering processes two years ago simply because of staff resources. One might win a contract, but as Ms Catríona Crowe and Mr. Chris Flynn know well, one has to fulfil the terms of the contract. One has to give the people involved in a project access to the materials to work with it and so forth. Such project management can be overwhelming for an organisation with the small number of staff we have.