The HardiBlog

The families of Owen Callaghan and David Flynn in Fallagh townland, just outside Kilmacthomas, Co. Waterford, emerged from the Great Famine with their large farms intact. Owen had died by 1850, leaving his widow Margaret holding their 212 acres, three vacant houses, outbuildings and a valuable dwelling house, all worth £164, making them one of the strongest farming families in the region (in comparison, the neighbouring Flynn farm was valued at £99). Owen, (likely her son), inherited the farm and was among the rate-payers representing Upperthird barony in the county presentment sessions. He died in 1895 aged 67 and by 1901 his wife Kate, with four unmarried adult sons and a daughter remained on the farm, employing two labourers. By then they had adopted O’Callaghan as their official name. It was William, who inherited the farm in turn, becoming a widely respected dairy farmer and progressive agriculturist, until his death aged 80 in 1954. Two years previous, the two ‘esteemed and well ...

Kanopy is a video streaming library which provides access to over 10,000 films/documentaries in a diverse range of subjects.  Kanopy covers a range of film genres including documentary, feature, foreign language, independent and instructional. New titles are added every month. Subject areas include: The Arts Business Education Global Studies & Languages Health Media & Communications Sciences Social Sciences Viewers can add films to their watchlists, create  film clips and playlists  highlighting particular sections or lists of films.  All films must be watched online, there is no download feature. Kanopy is accessed via the Library catalogue. Collection Development

  In 2023, the University of Galway Library digitised Professor Kerby Miller’s (Professor Emeritus of History, University of Missouri) donated research collection. His collection offers a deep reading into the lives of Irish emigrants to North America and the development of Irish diaspora identities across more than 250 years. Phase 1 of making this important collection available to the public online is underway, with the aim to publish all collected Irish emigrant letters to a dedicated online portal in early 2024. The digital curation workflow involves processing , selecting and describing the letters as unique items. The curation methodology is built on an interdisciplinary approach, and this article summarises some of the strategies and advancements made to date. Process  The collection digitisation concluded in March 2023, with 150,000+ pages scanned to hi-resolution TIF format, according to international digital preservation standards. In anticipation of the workflow'...

  The Library has taken out a 12 month a subscription to the  AM Explorer Primary Sources  database.   AM Explorer is the platform interface to Adam Matthews' primary source content of   130 digital collections spanning the social sciences and humanities.  Examples of the digital collections available are: African American Communities 1863-1986 American History 1493-1945 Defining Gender 1400-1949 East India Company 1600-1947 London Low Life 1700-1900 Slavery, Abolition and Popular Culture 1400s-2000s Victorian Popular Culture 1779-1930 Historical digital material available includes correspondence, diaries, ephemera, i llustrations, periodicals & printed books, legal documents & maps, newspapers, official records & oral histories.    Search AM Explorer by keyword or browse  the fascinating  AM Explorer list of collection s . Collection Development

  My previous blog post on the NORF Open Access Repositories project outlined the preparatory work for interviews with stakeholders working in or with Irish repositories. Since then, I have conducted seven interviews with repository managers overseeing academic and governmental repositories across Ireland. Five further interviews with repository strategists will follow later in September. We designed semi-structured interviews with repository managers to cover a range of issues related not only to technical questions around metadata, but also to determine what issues most affect open access repositories in Ireland, what barriers to greater metadata compliance they face, and what other issues affect the daily running and strategic development of such repositories. Below I outline how interviewees were selected, how the interviews were conducted, and some preliminary insights after the repository manager interviews. Selecting Interviewees Data gathering using qualitative, semi-s...

  Today we are talking to Wilhelm Widmark , Library Director at Stockholm University Library , about the Open Access strategy of Swedish universities and research institutes who are organised in the Bibsam Consortium .     Hardy: Hello Wilhelm! Thanks for talking to me. To start our conversation can you please introduce yourself? Wilhelm : Sure, I'm Wilhelm Widmark and I'm working as the Library Director at Stockholm University and have done that for the last 12 years. I'm also the Senior Advisor to the President of Stockholm University in questions regarding Open Science. I work as the Vice Chair of the Swedish Bibsam Consortium where our University President, Astrid Söderbergh Widding , is the Chair and we work closely together in the Consortium. I'm also Director of EOSC , the European Open Science Cloud . In Sweden, we have the Rectors Conference of The Association of Swedish Higher Education Institutions which has different subgroups, and one of the groups is...