New Collection: Bray Arts Journals

Bray Arts was founded in 1996 and is made up of visual artists, writers, musicians, performance artists, and arts administrators. The volunteer-led organisation has worked to raise the profile of artists in their community by providing them with a platform for their work that includes events, a journal, and a website. Bray Arts were recipients of the DRI Community Archive Scheme for 2022. The Bray Arts Journal Collection is the first of three collections that Bray Arts will make available through the Repository. The collection contains the journals of the organisation from 2016 to 2019. 

On the publication of the collection, Bray Arts volunteers Dermot McCabe and Cearbhall O'Meadhra said:

It is not much more than a year ago since Bray Arts made contact with DRI to ask for advice on the preservation of a collection of Art Journals recording the cultural and artistic life of Bray and surrounding districts over a period covering a couple of decades. We were concerned that this valuable digital collection was vulnerable and needed to be preserved in a highly secure archive and made available to the public in perpetuity. With excellent ongoing training, documentation, videos and great personalised support from DRI, we have published our first sub-collection of journals and in the process learned a great deal about all facets of the development of a repository with CoreTrustSeal certification.

DRI Director Natalie Harrower said:

One thing that is clear when you work with such an array of groups across the island is that not all archives are resourced equally, and in fact, the majority of them are under-resourced, but still manage to maintain brilliant collections due to the dedication of a small number of staff or volunteers. We developed the Community Archives Scheme as one small way to try and support these hardworking archives in their efforts to preserve digital collections. So today we are delighted to see the inclusion of the Bray Arts Journal in the Repository; this collection is particularly important as it showcases the artistic output of one community and neighbourhood – Bray, and its surroundings. It’s a reminder of the vibrancy of work being undertaken by community arts groups all over Ireland and the need to preserve that work for long-term access and discovery.

Bray Arts joins a growing number of Community Award Scheme recipients who have preserved their material in DRI. We encourage you to explore this collection through the Repository. The Community Archive Scheme will open for 2023 on 1 September 2022 and we will be running an information morning about the scheme and how you may apply. To find out more about it and when it opens you can subscribe to our newsletter or follow us on Twitter or Instagram. 

Image: The image is the cover of Bray Arts Journal Volume 22 2016  https://doi.org/10.7486/DRI.6d57cp43b