Centre Culturel Irlandais
Portal of collections

Digitization programme

A project has been launched to digitize the Irish College Historical Archives. The objectives are threefold: to facilitate access for researchers, to give a new visibility to the collection and to ensure the preservation of the more fragile items by limiting the amount of handling of the originals.

Thanks to the financial support of the Irish Governement and French National Library, 4300 individual documents have been digitized so far, which represents more than 24 000 images.

This selection represents 20% of the collection and was based on the following criteria:

  • Oldest, rare and precious documents
  • Documents containing lists of students, teachers or names of other persons related to the Irish College
  • Documents relating to the administration of the Irish College Paris, the Arcueil country house, and the various Irish Colleges in France (Nantes, Bordeaux, Douai…)
  • Illustrations (photographs, drawings, maps, plans)
  • Documents relating to the bursaries which were granted to the Irish students coming to Paris

Please note that sometimes the selected files haven’t been entirely digitized (because some of the papers did not match the selection criteria, or because they were still under copyright).

The digitized archives are accessible to all, free of charge, on the online catalogue.

On the list of results, when you see an icon featuring a red dot, it means that a digitized item is linked and viewable online. You just have to click :

(8 images)

 

Learn more about the coding system for the digitized images

The titles of the digitized images follow three different rules, depending on the circumstances:

  • If a file contains more than one item and if they are related, their title will then be the same; consequently, the title will be completed by a number (the order number in the file), to allow researchers to differentiate between the discrete elements. An example with the reference A2.e74.  
  • Sometimes, the files haven’t been entirely digitized (because some of the papers did not match the selection criteria, or because they were still under copyright), so the numbers in the titles don’t begin with 1. An example with the reference A2.e36. 
  • Last example: items are totally different, and have their own individual title. Consequently, they do not have an order number. An example with the reference A1.c2.