The HardiBlog

  Special Collections Books relating to Irish Culture Anticipating the festival of St. Patrick and all things Irish-related which we’ll be celebrating next month we decided to remind ourselves of some of books on Ireland held in our Special Collections, some of which have quite unique attributes. Sadly, it will be some time yet before you can come and look at the real thing but the good news is that through wonderful digitization initiatives, you can read the content of these books online now. John Lynch’s Cambrensis Eversus , was published in 1662. He was a Catholic cleric, born in Galway but obliged to flee the city following the arrival of Cromwellian forces in 1652. Thereafter he seems to have spent his life on the continent, principally in France. Cambrensis Eversus is a refutation of a much earlier history of Ireland by the Welsh scholar, Geraldus Cambrensis or Gerald of Wales. A copy of his book, which portrayed Ireland as a primitive and barbaric country, had been republish

We recently migrated the digitised records we have from the Galway Corporation records archive to our digital repository . The archive contains the records of the Galway Corporation from its foundation in 1485 to 1818. The statute book from 1485 to 1710 (named Liber A) gives the names of members of the corporation, statutes passed, and the minute books of meetings of the corporation from 1679. The minute books contain the dates of meetings, attendance, and business transacted. Liber A script can be challenging to read, and it was transcribed at a later date. The transcription is also published alongside the original manuscript . Liber A makes for interesting reading, while the town may have struggled somewhat in the fourteenth century, there is no doubt that the town begun to expand rapidly in the fifteenth century. We have picked some highlights of the material that show how important Galway’s walls were to the running of the town, how important sanitation was, and also the control

  In December 2020, the Science Foundation Ireland updated its Open Access Policy . In this blog post we are looking at why this happened and what it means for current and future grant holders.  Image above by Alan Robb from Pixabay Background The history to the Open Access movement goes back a long time but for this blog post we will just go back to 2019, when the National Framework on the Transition to an Open Research Environment was published by the Irish Government. It states “The principles of the National Framework support access to research funded by the Irish Government” which of course includes SFI grants. There was also a commitment that the National Framework “will move to alignment with developing European Commission policy and the principles of Plan S”. SFI is of course a member of cOAlition S , an international consortium of research funders that stipulates that “from 2021, scientific publications that result from research funded by public grants must be publi