Georgian Dublin : architecture and the built environment

This paper reports on the digitisation and cataloguing of photographic slides of Dublin’s Georgian architecture which was conducted as part of the UCD Irish Virtual Research Library and Archive (IVRLA) series of demonstrator research projects. The UCD School of Art History and Cultural Policy have a library of photographic slides taken between 1978 and 2005. While these had previously been used for School teaching purposes only, they were long recognized as a potentially significant resource for students of Irish architecture in general. It was decided for this project to digitise and catalogue a sub-set of 200 images which specifically concentrated on Dublin’s Georgian architecture. These have been presented as two different collections of 100 images each: “Domestic Architecture of Georgian Dublin” and “Civic and Ecclesiastical Architecture of Georgian Dublin.” The remit of the IVRLA demonstrator projects was to provide digital research resources and to show how digital repositories could not only provide access to archival research materials, but could also present material in new ways and suggest possibilities for further research. This project did so by providing two properly constituted and curated collections which then allowed the UCD School or Art History and Cultural Policy to contribute these images and related metadata to the worldwide ARTstor resource. As a result of this project, further images have been identified which will also be digitised, catalogued and contributed to ARTstor. The paper additionally reports on the process of selecting appropriate slides for digitisation, assembling and entering the metadata, and gives an overview of specific features of the collections and their research potential.