The Hunt Museum joins the Digital Repository of Ireland

The Hunt Museum preserves and exhibits the original artefacts from ‘the Hunt Collection’, an eclectic collection of approximately 2,000 works of art and antiquities gathered by antique dealers and collectors John and Gertrude Hunt over a lifetime. This diverse collection contains artefacts from Greece, Rome, Egypt and the Olmec civilisation as well as an important collection of Irish prehistoric archaeological material ranging from Mesolithic through to the Iron Age and artistic works from artists like Pablo Picasso and Jack B. Yeats, among others. The Museum also displays its own collections and exhibitions, such as ‘Sybil’, an exhibition featuring a rich array of designs and sketches related to the career of renowned haute couture designer Sybil Connolly (1921–1998). Described as a ‘cabinet for the curious’, the Hunt Museum is dedicated to enriching lives with culture, creativity, and learning.

The Hunt Museum Strategy 2025 aims to widen the interaction with the Hunt Museum’s collections through physical and virtual platforms. Membership of DRI will help the Hunt Museum to achieve the goal of widening access to its collections by preserving them on DRI and other digital platforms like Europeana. As a national aggregator for Europeana, DRI supports the aggregation of Irish digital cultural heritage content to the Europeana collections platform, which provides a centralised search and discovery portal for content from European Cultural Heritage Institutes, and can make Irish content, like the Hunt Museum collections, accessible to a wider European audience. The Hunt Museum is also interested in opportunities to publish International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) compliant collections with the guidance of DRI expertise and to undertake digital preservation training.

The Hunt Museum Collections Coordinator Sian McInerney commented on the significance of the Hunt Museum joining DRI:

We are so pleased to be part of the DRI Network. We know it will give us new opportunities to collaborate with other institutions and learn from the expertise at the DRI. As we are very interested in publishing standards such as IIIF and data preservation for the Hunt Museum Digital Collections, we know we will benefit from the exchange of knowledge that membership will give us. It also provides new fora for sharing our collections to a wider audience through online publication on the DRI and Europeana portals.  

DRI Director Dr Natalie Harrower welcomed our latest member:

We are very pleased that the Hunt Museum is joining the Digital Repository of Ireland, as we both share an interest in the broadest possible sharing of data according to best practice standards. This includes publication on shared platforms as well as aggregation to important digital libraries such as Europeana. We also both share an interest in the further development of the common standard IIIF, the International Image Interoperability Framework, which enables side-by-side viewing of items from different repositories. And of course, at the heart of it, we are delighted to welcome the Hunt Museum’s wonderful collections into DRI’s growing collections.

DRI looks forward to welcoming the Hunt Museum to an international collaborative network for data archiving and preservation and to working with the Hunt to digitally preserve their important collections for long-term access. Keep an eye on our Twitter feed for updates on collection publications.

Visit our Membership page to learn more about DRI Membership opportunities.