UCD’s School of Information and Communication Studies and the Digital Repository of Ireland Launch Collaboration in a New Service Learning Initiative.
UCD’s School of Information and Communication Studies and the Digital Repository of Ireland Launch Collaboration in a New Service Learning Initiative.
UCD’s School of Information and Communication Studies (ICS) and the Digital Repository of Ireland ((opens in a new window)DRI) are pleased to announce a new collaboration that will see ICS postgraduate students placed at the Digital Repository of Ireland as part of a service learning initiative. Select students will earn module credits toward their degree at ICS, while also sharing their expertise with archives and community groups keen to archive, preserve, and share their collections with a wider audience.
This new collaboration will provide hands-on training to one or two ICS postgrads per academic year, while at the same time enabling the custodians of Ireland’s social and cultural data to make their collections viewable alongside the Digital Repository of Ireland’s wide range of data.
For the 2016-2017 academic year, ICS and DRI will be (opens in a new window)working with the Project Arts Centre in Dublin to create a rich digital archive of objects from their 50 year history. This initiative is part of Project50 – the Project Arts Centre’s celebration of their half-century anniversary. Students will assist in archival appraisal, selection, digitisation, metadata creation and repository ingest, learning about, and stewarding the process of digital archive creation from beginning to end.
Professor Kalpana Shankar, Head of School at ICS, sees this project as a unique opportunity for UCD, DRI and community archives to work together on a number of mutually beneficial fronts. “UCD and DRI envision making this endeavor an ongoing partnership with other community and cultural groups who have similar “archives at risk” but insufficient time, expertise, and resources to make them available digitally,” she said.
Dr. Natalie Harrower, Director of DRI, said: “This new partnership with the UCD School of Information and Communication Studies is fitting and timely. DRI’s central function is to provide long-term preservation services, but we are also a research centre dedicated to archival best practices with a broad-reaching education and outreach programme. This collaboration with UCD is an opportunity to engage directly with the higher education sector and the training of new information professionals. Partnering with the Project Arts Centre as our first community collaborator allows us to investigate the preservation of visual and performing arts data in a focused way.”
UCD Information and Communication Studies (ICS) is the only Information School in Ireland with undergraduate and postgraduate courses in information and library studies, social computing, digital curation, and information systems. The Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI), headquartered at the Royal Irish Academy, is the national trusted digital repository for Ireland's social and cultural data. The repository links together and preserves both historical and contemporary data held by Irish institutions. Project Arts Centre (PAC) is Ireland’s leading centre for the presentation and development of contemporary art, dedicated to protecting the independent sector and nurturing the next generation of Irish artists across all forms of the performing and visual arts.