Transforming Irish family history research: the NLI’s Catholic Parish Register digitisation project

Ciara Kerrigan

from this… …to this…

Why these records?

- Only record of existence of most Irish people in 18th and 19th centuries

- Provide evidence of direct links between generations (via baptism records) and between families (via marriage records)

- Single most used collection in NLI (27,000 people in 2014)

- Only available onsite on microfilm

Challenges

- Small NLI team/budget- Varying quality of images- No index/transcriptions- Technology and users- Environment

The plan!

- Consultation/brainstorming- Guiding principle- Use of NLI’s LMS to manage

data- Enhancements to be

reusable- Parish map

Methodology

- Data preparation- Ingest images- Develop microsite –

interface/viewer/maps- Visuals – “look and feel”- Testing

Demo!

http://registers.nli.ie/

Impact

- 7.75m page views- 460,000 unique users- 1.3m sessions- 9 mins=average length of

session- 59% of users overseas- FMP/Ancestry index

Comments…

Screenshot of feedback, tweets