‘A Digital Archive of Ireland’s Ordnance Survey’: Connecting Collections for Nineteenth-Century Ireland

A three-year digital humanities research project, a collaboration between Queen’s University Belfast (QUB), the University of Limerick (UL) and the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI), gathered historic Irish Ordnance Survey (OS) maps and texts into a single freely accessible online resource for academic and public use. ‘A Digital Archive of Ireland’s Ordnance Survey’ was launched in June 2024 and is now available online https://dri.ie/os200/spotlight/os200.

The First Edition Six-Inch OS maps with the OS Memoirs, Letters and Name Books were held in several GLAM institutions and public organisations, including Queen’s University Belfast Map Library, the Royal Irish Academy, Tailte Éireann (formerly the Ordnance Survey of Ireland), Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland, National Library of Ireland (NLI), National Library of Scotland (NLS) and Public Records of Northern Ireland (PRONI). The diverse nature of ownership and metadata presented several unique challenges and this paper will discuss how the project managed ownership of data, copyright and licensing. The final digitised sources were preserved in the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI).

A key issue for this project was its cartographic nature. The emphasis on location data and the need for a web map interface created a special case study in the integration of spatial metadata within the repository. Issues arose surrounding the linking and correlation of spatial data across modern political boundaries as well as the historical development of these boundaries. Further challenges developed due to the high spatial resolution of the project’s location data, which presented over 60,000 location points.