Dinny McGinley (Donegal South West, Fine Gael)
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Question 86: To ask the Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism the progress that has been made in relation to the digitisation of national cultural institution collections; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [16480/09]

Martin Cullen (Waterford, Fianna Fail)
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I refer the Deputy to my reply to Questions 47821 and 47825 on 27th January 2009.

I wish, however, to confirm to the House that progress is continuing to be made with the digitisation of state papers and the paper based collections of the relevant national cultural institutions, commensurate with the availability of resources. In particular, the Deputy may wish to note that the digitised records of the 1911 Census returns for Dublin City and County were made available free of charge on the National Archives Census Website since December 2007. The 1911 returns for Antrim, Down and Kerry were added to the website in December 2008. It is planned that the remainder of the 1911 returns will be published on the website during the late spring and summer of 2009, beginning with those for Donegal, Cork, Wexford, Galway and Offaly, and all of the 1901 returns are due for publication by the end of 2009.

During the 16 months from the launch of the Census Website in December 2007 up to March 2009, the number of visits to the Census Website was more than 5,000,000 (five million) and the number of hits on the site has exceeded 74,000,000 (seventy four million). As previously stated, on a single day - 23 December 2008, which was the first full day after the launch of the 1911 returns for Antrim, Down and Kerry, there were more than 80,000 visits and 570,000 hits.

As resources permit other archives of major importance for genealogy will be added to the National Archives suite of websites in 2010 and subsequent years. In addition, a number of projects leading to the publication of archives of primarily historical interest on the web are currently under consideration, with a view to commencing the publication of a series of archives during 2009 and 2010.