DRI’s Annual Community Archive Scheme Opens for 2023

The Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) is delighted to announce that our annual Community Archive Scheme is open for applications for 2023. The Community Archive Scheme is one way that DRI works to help preserve and steward Cultural Heritage, Social Science and Research Data by giving Community Groups with at-risk digital material a route to preservation. As a publicly funded repository for Ireland’s social and cultural data DRI believes it is important to make long-term preservation accessible to a wide range of organisations, including those operating on a non-funded, voluntary basis. 

This scheme offers associate membership to a no, or low, funded group for the period of time it takes them to ingest a collection (see benefits aligned with ‘Associate’ level membership on our DRI Membership page: https://dri.ie/membership). There have been eight previous winners of the Community Archive Scheme including Cork LGBT Archive (2019), Asylum Archive (2020), Cork Community Media Hub (2020), Dublin Ghost Signs (2021), Joe Lee Community Film, The Elephant Collective (2021), Tulsk History Society (2022) and Bray Arts (2022). 

DRI Director Natalie Harrower said:

As a national repository for social and cultural data, DRI aims to reflect Ireland in all its diversity, and we recognise that many wonderful collections are housed by community groups and volunteers that lack the infrastructure and funding to make these collections available. Through this scheme we are both able to provide repository services to these archives, and learn from what they do: it’s an excellent exchange and we value it very much.

One of the 2022 Community Archive Scheme winners was the Tulsk History Society. On the publication of their collection Noel Sheerin of the society said: 

The DRI Community Archive Scheme has enabled Tulsk History Society to place a rare collection of old handwritten letters into the public domain where researchers and other like-minded individuals can interrogate their contents to get a better understanding of the poor living conditions in rural Ireland as well as the opportunities on offer for a new life abroad. The letters, their creators and recipients are now getting the attention they deserve. 

You can explore the Tulsk History Society Collection on the repository. https://doi.org/10.7486/DRI.7h14qf91p-1 You can learn more about the vulnerabilities of digital Cultural Heritage data in this short clip produced by DRI, the National Library of Ireland (NLI) and the Research Data Alliance (RDA). https://vimeo.com/731331150

We will be accepting applications from Thursday 1 of September until midnight Friday 28 of October. 

For more information on the DRI Community Archive Scheme and to download the application form please visit our dedicated webpage: https://www.dri.ie/dri-community-archive-scheme If you have any further questions please email members@dri.ie