The HardiBlog

The Imirce project will be featured in the latest season of The History Show with Myles Dungan for RTÉ. The forthcoming episode features a panel of interviews discussing the work of historian Kerby A. Miller and the Imirce digital project that aims to preserve and make available the stories of Irish emigrants who went to North America. Dating across multiple centuries (ca. 1680 to 1990), the collected letters and life stories published to Imirce showcase the Irish emigrants’ place in the formative history of the United States and Canada, and the societal ripple effects of emigration for the Irish who remained. The interviewees include Dan Carey (Professor of English), Marie-Louise Rouget (Digital Archivist and Imirce Project Manager), Helen Hayes Sweeney (History PhD candidate) and Breandán Mac Suibhne (Professor of Modern Irish History) from the University of Galway. The Imirce episode will be released on RTÉ Radio 1 on Sunday 7 September at 6pm. Following the initial broadcast...

“The men and women of our diaspora represent not simply a series of departures and losses. They remain, even while absent, a precious reflection of our own growth and change, a precious reminder of the many strands of identity which compose our story.” Mary Robinson Since its launch in March 2024, the Imirce project in the University of Galway Library has been growing from strength to strength, and picking up supporters left and right. Building on the strong foundation made by the historian Kerby A. Miller, the project is dedicated to preserving, interpreting and sharing the lived experiences of Irish emigrants who travelled west to North America across multiple centuries. As this history and legacy is shared it is natural that the project relies on the generosity, collaboration and trust of multiple stakeholders to ensure its successful continuation and we already have lots to share and give thanks for in the early months of 2025. Support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York On ...

Since the summer, the Open and Digital Research Team in the Library have been testing and refining an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) pipeline. The Library’s OCR pipeline aims to convert scanned images of textual archival records into a format that is machine-readable, at scale. This is an especially important enhancement to the University’s digitised heritage collections, making its holdings more searchable and supporting diverse areas of research interest. The first test case for the pipeline has been the Irish emigrant letters taken from the Kerby A. Miller Collection, as published online to the Library’s Digital Collections and a standalone digital repository for materials relating to Irish emigrants to North America called Imirce . In December 2024, the first batch of OCR enriched material has been launched to both the Digital Collections and Imirce online, and further heritage collections are scheduled for processing in 2025.  What this means for users  The Digital ...

On Tuesday 3 December, the Imirce project team hosted a Collection Day for members of the public to donate new material towards the digital repository of Irish emigrant letters and memoirs. In a single morning the digital collection has been enriched with 400+ more letters that will be released online by February 2025. The Day The morning began with a welcome, introductions and some background about the Imirce project presented by Catriona Cannon (Head of Heritage Collections and Digitisation), Daniel Carey (Professor of English), Breandán Mac Suibhne (Professor of Modern Irish History) and Marie-Louise Rouget (Digital Archivist for the Imirce project). The donors then moved through a morning of interview sessions to review their donated letters, sign deposit agreements and take part in recorded oral history interviews. All donors were also given a tour of the digitisation studio, hosted by Brendan Duffy and Eimhin Joyce, giving them a peek behind the scenes to better understand and a...