National Library of Ireland

Then, Then and Now Photographic Projects

by Bean an Phoist on April 13, 2012 · 12 comments

in Cataloguing,Collections,Digital Collections,Digitisation,Guest Bloggers,Photographs,Projects

by Pádraig Laffan, Vice-Chairperson of The Federation of Local History Societies

The Federation for Ulster Local Studies and The Federation of Local History Societies and The National Library Project

Have you ever thought how great it would be to walk along by the Liffey with your grandchildren and to be able to say to them “I helped build that bridge”? Well, a great bunch of volunteers has done something just like that, and about which they will be able to brag to their grandchildren. However, it is not bricks and cement or even steel. It is on the Web. It will still be useful in their grandchildren’s time. In fact, it will get better with age.

The Temple at Castleblayney, Co. Monaghan from our Lawrence Photographic Collection, late 19th century (L_ROY_09002); Then photographed on a sunny Sunday, 9 September 1990 at 1.30 p.m. (LPP_15A/26)

Here’s the story: Way back in 1989, while we all still used film in our cameras and before the days of easy communications with email and texting, two Federations (for Ulster Local Studies and of Local History Societies) got together to plan a project which would directly involve local history societies in every county of Ireland.

The plan was to select representative pictures of every county, and possibly every town, from the many thousands in the Lawrence Photographic Collection held in the National Library of Ireland, and have somebody locally re-take the picture from the same viewpoint, at what was then approximately 100 years since the original photograph had been taken.

We approached Dr. Patrica Donlon at the National Library; she, representing the NLI, could hardly have been more helpful or enthusiastic.

Main Street in Boyle, Co. Roscommon from our Lawrence Photographic Collection, late 19th/early 20th century (L_ROY_07361); Then photographed on Saturday, 29 September 1990 at 2.15 p.m. (LPP_33/33)

Lawrence Photographic Project 1990/1991

The NLI supplied the 1,000 selected scenes on lovely 10x8s (we were all in inches then). Fuji Ireland became our main sponsor. They supplied and agreed to process 100 rolls of film, and print 2,400 colour 12×8 prints. A lot of work by All-Ireland teams validated the picture choices, and spread the word amongst local history societies. In the course of time we sent out the films and a photocopy of the scenes, with instructions to take three different exposures of each scene.

As the films came back, we chose the best exposures and Fuji printed them. We made up the packages, which have resided in the National Library of Ireland, the Ulster Museum, and also some local libraries since then. Each package consists of an original Lawrence print, an A4 card with a photocopy picture and all the relevant information – date, time, photographer, neg. number, etc. All of this was a massive piece of North/South co-operation at a time when over the border terrible turbulence reigned. There was one memorable day when we spread everything out on the large wooden floor of the new RTÉ studios in Dundalk and walked up and down through the collection as we sorted it.

Egyptian Arch at Newry, Co. Down from our Lawrence Photographic Collection, late 19th/early 20th century (L_ROY_08886); Then photographed on a sunny Monday, 10 September 1990 at 11.15 a.m. (LPP_13/3). The photographer painstakingly captured a car passing under the arch, just as there had been a horse-drawn cart in the original Lawrence photo...

There is a wealth of stories recorded in this project about the old photographs and the adventures encountered in re-taking them in a catalogue booklet included with the collection. However, members also responded with comments like “If W. Lawrence was here now, that’s not the significant scene he would take!” and, “We have scenes which would better represent our place!” – Also “Why did he not put in a little information about the subject of the photograph”, “or even the correct county?”

There was also a general feeling that we could harness this new ‘photo–history–community’ surge of interest, for another new project.

Our Own Place 1993/1996

In the early 1990s, the two Federations (Ulster Local Studies and Local History Societies) put their respective heads together and came up with a project, which we called Our Own Place. For this, each group had twenty categories of picture ranging from the usual architectural scenes to ‘people at work’, ‘people at play’, houses, shops, and many others. RTÉ financially supported this project, and we started work again.

A card from the Our Own Place Photographic Project (taken on Wednesday, 27 October 1993 at 10.15am) showing Charlie Stitt working on an Oarsman 15 rowing boat, in his boatyard in the townland of Drumgurland, Islandmagee, Co. Antrim

Finally in 1996, we were in a position to lodge 800 cards, each with its own picture and descriptive text paragraph and containing all the relevant data (researcher, photographer, location, etc.) with the Ulster Museum, the National Library, and our sponsor RTÉ.

Fruit of the labours of our volunteers - one of the Our Own Place catalogue records. NLI ref.: OOP_17/34

Last year, Liam Clare (my colleague in FLHS, who was also involved in creating these collections) and I, approached NLI Head of Collections, Colette O Flaherty, about raising the profile of these collections in the National Library’s online catalogue. She proposed that our members might wish to engage in another great voluntary project. The Federations agreed and we started back in February 2012. We recruited volunteers, including some historians, some friends, others just keen to become involved, some very amateur computer users and other very highly qualified computer and information experts. The NLI appointed Aoife O’Connell as our instructor and mentor. She prepared instruction packs; got us a work location in the Manuscripts Reading Room and liaised with the Library’s IT section which provided five laptops for us. Finally, a little shakily we started, with every day’s work being error-checked by Aoife and uploaded to the NLI catalogue that evening. As March ended, Our Own Place was completed. The physical materials from that project were archive packed, labelled, and consigned to storage.

Our wonderful volunteers hard at work. From left (sitting): Mary Holian, Paddy Daly, Leeann Quinn, Betty Quinn. And that is Aoife O'Connell in the middle, trying to hide behind Leeann's laptop. Aoife (who wrote last week's blog post about our Lawrence Photographic Collection) is managing the whole project, and mentoring all of the volunteers.

Cataloguing the Lawrence Photographic Project required a little re-training from Aoife, and we were off again. The camaraderie in the groups was wonderful, and they all fell in love with always helpful, always patient Aoife. Somebody said of working in the NLI Manuscripts Reading Room, “It was great but it was like a retreat, we couldn’t talk out loud.” The Lawrence Photographic Project has carried on through April and it all looks set to finish in May. Then, when Library staff scan and upload the pictures, we will have two historically valuable resources available to researchers everywhere.

The record for just one of the Lawrence Photographic Project 1990/1991 photographs, meticulously catalogued by our fanastic volunteers. For now, the Flickr link in the catalogue brings you to information about the original Lawrence image. NLI ref.: LPP_44/23

One could hardly thank all the volunteers enough for their commitment to these projects and their hard work, including long distances travelled each day to the Library. In a time of some national gloom, they are shining stars.

Tagged as: 10x8s, 12x8s, Aoife O'Connell, Catalogue, Cataloguing, Colette O'Flaherty, Dr. Pat Donlon, Dundalk, Federation for Ulster Local Studies, Federation of Local History Societies, Film, Fuji Ireland, Lawrence Collection, Lawrence Photographic Collection, Lawrence Photographic Project, Liam Clare, Local history, Local History Societies, National Library of Ireland, Our Own Place, Pádraig Laffan, Photographs, Photography, Prints, Robert French, RTÉ, Ulster Museum, Volunteers, W. Lawrence, William Lawrence

{ 12 comments }

Improving access to the Lawrence Collection

by Bean an Phoist on April 5, 2012 · 6 comments

in Cataloguing,Collections,Digitisation,Maps,Photographs,Projects

by Aoife O’Connell, Catalogue Development Student

The National Library of Ireland holds a number of historically valuable and interesting photographic collections. Perhaps the best known and most utilised of these over the years since its acquisition has been the Lawrence Collection. It was acquired in 1943 for the then huge sum of £300. The popularity of the collection is a testament to the quality and value of the images. Here in the Information Systems department of the Library, great work has been going on behind the scenes as we endeavour to bring as much of the Library’s wonderful collections to as wide an audience as possible, by making them available to search in new and improved ways. The most recent result of these endeavours is the replacement of approximately 23,000 Lawrence Collection records on our online catalogue with new records containing extra information and features, and the addition of 14,500 new catalogue records that were never online before. These new catalogue records relate to the Lawrence Imperial and New Series (though the images have yet to be digitised).

From our Lawrence Cabinet photographs - Tourists motoring past Long Tunnel Cottage, Glengariff, Co. Cork, circa 1906/07. NLI ref. LCAB 08742

The National Library’s Lawrence Collection consists of approximately 40,000 photographic glass plate negatives generated by the Lawrence photographic studios of Dublin, largely for tourist markets. They range in date from 1865 to 1914 and are divided into three distinct sections based on size: there are 4,500 Imperial plates (12” x 10”), 10,000 Cabinet plates (7.5” x 5”), and 13,000 Royal plates (8.5” x 6.5”). There are also about 10,000 Lawrence New Series negatives, which are an assortment of all three plate sizes and were images rejected by Lawrence for being imperfect. These photographs consist mainly of topographical views of Ireland, including almost every small town and village in the country, and often including people and activities. However, political events were generally not photographed. There are also some interior views, including here at the National Library! Most of our Lawrence images were photographed by the Dublin photographer, Robert French (1841-1917), between 1870 and 1914.

Detail from one of our Lawrence Royal photographs - Men working at Belfast Docks laying a baulk road for the internal dock railway, circa 1890. NLI ref. LROY 02383

Up until now, the Lawrence Imperial or New Series images were not searchable on our online catalogue. And though the Lawrence Royal and Cabinet photographic negatives were searchable online (along with digital images), these records, which drew on information contained in the Lawrence Day Book, were quite basic. Furthermore, it wasn’t possible for library staff to edit the records when new information became available. Now that we have added these 40,000 catalogue records however, the whole of this fantastic collection is now available to library users and people all over the world for online searches. Extra information has been added to improve the records, and library staff can now easily update the records! So how did we do it?

We even appear in the Lawrence Collection, complete with carriages and a fairly sizeable pothole, 1890s. NLI ref. LROY 2501

Rather than create a single catalogue record for every individual glass plate in the collection (which would have been laborious and taken a very long time!), we took a different approach. We decided to work with a database that already existed in the Library and map the information contained in it onto Virtua, our Library Management System. This method was also used recently to catalogue the O’Dea Photograph Collection and the Longfield Map Collection, and will also be used to make the Eason, Valentine, Cardall, Stereo Pairs and Eblana Photograph Collections available in the coming months.

Of course, this process wasn’t entirely straightforward. The data contained in the Lawrence Collection database (thanks to the great work of Glynis Pickett and Joanna Murphy!) formed the essential foundation for our work, however it was not suitable for mapping to our Virtua LMS straight away. We built on this work and using Google Refine (a free open source software tool), we were able to clean up the data and make it usable for our purposes with (relative!) ease.

Google Refine in action on our Lawrence Collection database

Google Refine is a great tool that makes it very easy to work with large amounts of data:

We used it to standardise the terminology and locations recorded in the Lawrence database in order to add extra information to the titles and add subject headings to each record. This means that any catalogue search will return comprehensive and accurate results.
We also used Google Refine to create new columns in the database that would be more appropriate for cataloguing and we moved data around these columns to maximise its usefulness.
Another great aspect of Google Refine is the function that allows you to expand your existing data by adding information from other databases, like Freebase. We used this function to add latitudes and longitudes to our records based on the locations already recorded in the database. So now, the majority of the Lawrence Collection catalogue records also contain a map view, pin-pointing on a map the spot where the photo was taken!

Explore clusters of Lawrence Collection photos taken all over Ireland in our Map View - 10 in Athenry, 285 in Athlone, while Dublin is hidden under the weight of photos...

These new catalogue records are rich, accurate and full of information. In terms of accessibility, they are an invaluable addition to the Library’s online catalogue. They can now be amended by library staff, so as new information comes to light (e.g. from our excellent Flickr users), it can be easily added to the catalogue further enhancing each record. Why don’t you take some time to search for your own hometown and see what has changed in the last hundred or so years! Or just browse the whole collection in our catalogue by searching for William Lawrence and filtering your search by photos. Several hundred Lawrence Collection photos are also on Flickr, so whenever you see the Flickr symbol on these records, click to find a wealth of extra information and great conversations!

Thanks to the amazing work with the Flickr API undertaken by our Software Development Student, Lutz Biedinger, all of the comments, tags and additional information on our photos that are contributed by our Flickr users are now integrated straight into our catalogue

And keep an eye out for an upcoming blog post about a volunteer project that is underway here at the Library, involving the cataloguing of two collections with close links to the Lawrence Collection, the Lawrence Photographic Project 1990/91 and Our Own Place.

Tagged as: Aoife O'Connell, Catalogue, Catalogue Development, Data Cleaning, Digital Images, flickr, Flickr API, Flickr Commons, Freebase, Glass Plate Negatives, Google Refine, Information Systems, Lawrence Cabinet, Lawrence Collection, Lawrence Day Book, Lawrence Imperial, Lawrence New Series, Lawrence Photographic Studio, Lawrence Royal, Library Management System, Lutz Biedinger, Map View, Mapping, Maps, Open Source, Photographs, Robert French, Topographical Views, Virtua, William Lawrence

{ 6 comments }

Family Fragments from the First World War

by Bean an Phoist on March 15, 2012 · 9 comments

in Digital Collections,Events,Projects

History as the Sum of Our Stories

by Avice-Claire McGovern, Librarian

The digital age has caused a shift in our collective remembrance practices. No longer solely the province of professional historians, the great democratization of information production and sharing brought about by the world-wide web means that anyone can contribute to the patchwork of the past. Hand in hand with (and no doubt fuelled by) these technological changes, we have witnessed a burgeoning interest in genealogy. While personal and ‘amateur’ histories (the sharing of testimonies, artefacts, family histories, etc.) cannot replace academic scholarship, they provide an important accompaniment (and at times corrective) to official accounts, revealing, at times, aspects of the past that hitherto have not received attention, and which perhaps do not fit neatly into established accounts of our mutual past. In other words, family history is not only of interest and relevance to a given family. It can shed new light on broader historical phenomena.

Our WWI Family History Roadshow takes place here at the National Library of Ireland on Wednesday, 21 March 2012 from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.

When I heard that the National Library of Ireland would be participating in the Europeana 1914-1918 project to build a First World War Digital Archive, I was delighted at the opportunity that this afforded me to share the stories of two of my relatives who served in the First World War – my grandmother’s first cousin John Dennis (Jack) Jenkinson, and my great grand uncle James Brady. The fate of these two men could not have been more different – Jack Jenkinson was killed on Sunday, 25th November 1917 at the age of only 19, determined to fight on the Western Front so that he could avoid the simultaneous conflict in Ireland, while James Brady was one of the lucky survivors of the War, seeing out his service in the relative safety of Malta. Our family has only three items that connect these two men with the First World War, items which this project allows us to record for future generations.

Jack Jenkinson as a little boy, dressed in a sailor's outfit

My grandmother is to be credited with keeping Jack Jenkinson’s memory alive within the family. She kept two photographs of her first cousin, which she treasured – one of him as a little boy, dressed in a sailor’s outfit. In the other – a poignant counterpoint to the first – he is dressed in military uniform. She would show these photographs to us, her grandchildren, and retell the story of his untimely death in the War. The photograph of the little boy was particularly moving, bearing, as it did, no trace of the horrors that lay ahead of him in his short life, and yet inextricably linked to the soldier of the second picture.

My grandmother knew that I was interested in history, especially that of the First World War. So, before she died, she entrusted to me these two treasured photographs along with a table cloth that James Brady, her maternal uncle, had brought back from Valetta, Malta, where he had been stationed.

John Dennis (Jack) Jenkinson

(29 December 1898 – 25 November 1917)

Jack Jenkinson was the eldest son of John Jenkinson and Norah Daly of Ulverston, Lancashire. Both he and my grandmother were directly descended from soldiers who had served in the British army at least as far back as the Peninsular War, many of whom were in the 17th Lancers. Following family tradition, Jack enlisted on 29th December 1912 at the age of only 14 under special War Office authority, joining the 16th Lancers at the Curragh Camp, County Kildare, Ireland. Here he would undergo training until he was old enough to join the regiment in India. He left for India in December 1913 and was drafted into the 17th Lancers in Sialkot, India (now in Pakistan) where he was appointed trumpeter. When the First World War broke out in August 1914, the 17th Lancers were deployed to France with the 1st Indian Expeditionary Force, but because he was so young, Jack Jenkinson was left behind in India and temporarily employed by the Catholic Soldiers’ Institute. In December 1914, he was sent back to the Curragh, a difficult journey during which his ship was attacked by the Turkish Army while passing through the Suez Canal. A skilled horseman, upon returning home, he was put to work training other soldiers in horsemanship and breaking in new horses.

Jack Jenkinson in 1917 - No. 4494 Trooper J. D. Jenkinson, 17th Lancers

When the Easter Rising broke out in April 1916, he was one of the Lancers put into action against the rebels on Sackville Street, Dublin. According to my grandmother, the events of the Easter Rising marked a turning point in his military career. Because of his Anglo-Irish ancestry and his many relatives living in Dublin, he was deeply traumatised by having to follow orders to shoot at Irish people, “his own”, as he saw them, and so, immediately after the Rising, he decided to volunteer for every cavalry draft sent to the regiment at the Curragh. Despite his abilities as a marksman, machine-gunner and bomber, he was again and again refused permission to go to France because of his youth. He was advised to apply for a commission instead, but he refused to do so. Finally on 30th October 1917, after home leave, he was sent to France as part of the D Squadron, 12th Battalion, the King’s (Liverpool Regiment). Less than a month later, on Sunday, 25th November 1917, he was dead from wounds sustained during the British advance at the Battle of Cambrai (20th November – 7th December). He lies buried at Gouzeaucourt New British Cemetery in France.

Death or Glory - Gravestone of Jack Jenkinson at Gouzeaucourt New British Cemetery, France

James Brady (1894-19??)

James Brady, my grandmother’s uncle, was the son of James Brady and Frances Kelly, of Bride Street, Dublin. Employed in Inchicore Railway Works as a coach painter, he joined the army on 2nd January 1917 at the age of 23. He was responding to the call by John Redmond for the National Volunteers to enlist and fight for the British in order to prove the loyalty of the Irish and thereby ensure that Home Rule would follow the War. He joined the Royal Garrison Artillery and was dispatched to Malta. While he was there, he sent postcards to his sister Frances (my great-grandmother) and on his return to Dublin after the war, he brought her back a beautiful velvet and silver-embroidered tablecloth from Valetta. The postcards are now unfortunately missing, passed once too often from family hand to hand, but the tablecloth remains in the family as a memento of James Brady’s service in the Great War.

Acknowledgements: A special thank you to Sandra Rogers of The War Graves Photographic Project for sending me the photograph of Jack Jenkinson’s grave in Gouzeaucourt New British Cemetery, France, and for allowing me to reproduce it here.

Tagged as: 12th Battalion, 16th Lancers, 17th Lancers, 1st Indian Expeditionary Force, Avice-Claire McGovern, Battle of Cambrai, Bride Street, Catholic Soldiers' Institute, Curragh Camp, D Squadron, Easter Rising, Europeana 1914-1918, Family History, First World War, France, Frances Brady, Frances Kelly, Gouzeaucourt New British Cemetery, Great War, Home Rule, Inchicore Railway Works, Jack Jenkinson, James Brady, John Jenkinson, John Redmond, King's (Liverpool Regiment), Malta, National Volunteers, Norah Daly, Photographs, Postcards, Royal Garrison Artillery, Sackville Street, Sialkot, Suez Canal, Tablecloth, Trumpeter, War Graves Photographic Project, Western Front, WWI