Irish Emigrants in Britain
An oral history archival project with a focus on Irish emigrants who left Ireland for Britain in the period before 1960.
The IOHA project, Irish Emigrants in Britain, has four main aims:
(Glenn Cumiskey recording members of the travelling community playing at a graveside - photo courtesy ITMA)
1. Collection
i. To collect the oral narratives of a representative cross-section of the emigrant population of Irish people who left Ireland for Britain, with a particular emphasis on those who migrated in the post-war period from 1940-1960.
ii. To carry out this collecting through a programme of digital audio and audio-visual recording, beginning in London, but also concentrating on other areas of Irish settlement in Britain.
iii. To make a representative collection of the oral narratives of their children, the second-generation.
iv. To make a representative collection of the ephemera (photographs, letters, written journals, newspaper clippings, video footage, songs and music etc.) associated with the oral narratives of participants so as to provide historical and cultural context to the oral collection.
v. To develop the potential of widening the collection of oral narratives to other areas of Irish settlement abroad including, but not exclusive to, North American, Canada and Australia.
2. Preservation
i. To preserve the collected materials indefinitely for present use and for future generations using such techniques as digitising, security copying on paper and suitable digital formats, binding, and by specialised archival and digital storage.
ii. To seek a suitable partnership with national archives both in Ireland and Britain, to ensure the long-term security of the material collected, as well as ensuring the widest possible access to the collection.
3. Organisation
To organise the information and materials held by the Archive through such library techniques as accessioning, classifying, stock-listing, cataloguing and indexing. The key to a successful archive is the ability to identify and locate the information relevant to a researcher. To this end the Archive will take full advantage of modern developments in cataloguing and information technology to organise its holdings in an instantly accessible fashion. This has been a service that traditional print-based libraries and archives have struggled to provide. This digital control of information is a major aspect of the Archive, and will be the basis of much future dissemination of information through the Internet.
4. Dissemination
To make the materials and information held as widely available as possible to the general public, consistent with the preservation of material and within the limitations of copyright law, while respecting ethical considerations inherent in the transmission of personal oral histories. The Archive aims to give full direct reference access; limited remote access by phone, fax, post and Internet; access by extensive broadcasting and lecturing, exhibiting and publishing activities; and by cooperating with a wide range of other organisations engaged in performance, teaching, broadcasting, publishing, and archiving.