Ms Judith McCarthy:

I would like to echo what Mr. Bradley has been saying. Digitisation is very important for us, but it is a challenge. There is no doubt financial and human resourcing challenges arise in this context. Our museum, which has a collection of approximately 7,000 objects, has four staff who have very specific roles and responsibilities. Unfortunately, digitisation is not one of our duties. We are busy engaging with the public on exhibitions and outreach work and caring for our collections. Digitisation has resource implications. This is more often seen in the archive and library sectors. The National Archives of Ireland have done amazing work to digitise some of their collections, such as the military archives. The work that has been done to digitise materials has been particularly evident during the decade of centenaries. Funding has been provided for that. We would like to see more work being done in the smaller museums. I am speaking from my own perspective when I say we do not have the resources to do this work at the moment. We do some work on an ad hoc basis, for example when we have a temporary exhibition. At the moment, we have an exhibition looking at the emigration of women from Donegal. When people bring things like photographs and letters into us, we scan that material and retain the copies in our collection while returning the original items to their owners. It is done on an exhibition by exhibition basis. We are certainly not doing it on any sort of coherent basis.