Mr. John O'Sullivan:

We have a programme to digitise all our historical records. They are an unique source, dating from the mid-1850s up to the current most extant early census. We are probably the main source for genealogical research in the country. Obviously, these are working documents but they are also archive documents. We have made a great deal of progress digitising them in recent years. The next stage will be to publish them online and index them in a way whereby they can be useful. A large group of people doing genealogical research on an ongoing basis would attend the office. We have some figures on that. There is not a great deal of money collected from those doing research but we think it is an important part of what we do and dates back to Griffith's Valuation.