Ms Eibhlin Roche:

One of the phrases used in the earlier sessions was related to an affinity with Ireland. That picks up closely on Ms Fitzsimons's point. One of my points relates to handling records. As a professional archivist, digital preservation and creating digital copies is definitely the way to go. As Mr. Donovan remarked, there are many standards for how to digitise records properly. It is "watch out" when we have many voluntary groups with the best intentions wishing to start digitising material, perhaps local parish records or other local material, without having true sight of what constitutes proper standards. When people are working with limited resources, they can sometimes be throwing bad money after good and someone may have to come along three or four years down the road and redigitise the records.

There is work to be done. Senator Labhrás Ó Murchú asked about the plan and what was next. One of the next parts of the plan is putting together a set of standards that will be readily available for people who are not part of a larger institution or do not have access to a professional archivist. These standards should outline what a digital preservation plan looks like, how people can go about digitising records and keep the context in which the records were created. As archivists, we are always big fans of context. A record is not created in isolation. At a simple level, that is what we have done with the Guinness archive. We have data about the individual and his date of birth. However, we have introduced a contextual element which explains the department and where the person worked. Adding this contextual information and keeping the context is interesting.

A point made by one of the previous speakers earlier this afternoon resonated with me. It was related to the overall plan and creating an inventory of the genealogical potential of the resources available. That rings true in trying to create a first base. We cannot decide what we are doing with the records unless we know what we have available. The second part is to create a plan of what we do with them. The idea is to try to identify an inventory or a resource in order that we all know exactly what records are available. We should then centralise them in order that we do not have visitors who are completely new to Ireland having to go to three or four websites to try to find the same information. It would be preferable to have the material centralised.