Preserving Ireland’s Digital Cultural Identity towards 2116

The Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) is a national Trusted Digital Repository for Ireland's social and cultural data, accredited by the Data Seal of Approval. The repository links together and preserves historical and contemporary data held by Irish institutions, providing a central internet access point and interactive multimedia tools. In June 2015, the Digital Repository of Ireland was publicly launched at the Digital Preservation for the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (DPASSH) conference. At this conference, three organisations were presented with the DRI ‘Decade of Centenaries Digital Preservation Award’, the culmination of a six month project aiming to provide support and training to owners of digital collections relating to the Irish decade of centenaries commemorations. This paper will discuss the implementation of this Irish Research Council-funded project which allowed staff from the DRI to engage with collection owners and provide digital preservation and digitisation services and training. In this paper we outline the aims of the project, the methods by which we engaged with relevant collection owners, and how our findings have helped to determine the status of digital preservation in Irish heritage organisations.