Documenting Ireland: Parliament, People and Migration, 18th-20th Centuries (DIPPAM)

The Documenting Ireland: Parliament, People and Migration 18th-20th Centuries (DIPPAM) website will make universally available to a very wide range of potential users some of the most important digital resources for recovering and reconstructing the history of modern Ireland and its diaspora, at global, national, local and individual levels. The searchable virtual library will bring together, and allow cross-searching of, both the 'official' records of British government in Ireland 1800-1922 (from the EPPI virtual library of enhanced parliamentary papers), and the 'unofficial' testimonies and records of Irish migrants and their families contained in the Irish Emigration Database (IED) for the 18th-20th centuries, and the Narratives of Migration and Return, Ulster (NMR) database of oral history sources for the later 20th century. The integrated resource will offer the public access to an unparalleled wealth of resources for investigating the social, economic and political history of the island in the 'long nineteenth century' and the experience of its internal and external migrants in a longer period stretching from the eighteenth century to the recent past. Users will be able to compare statistical and quantitative information (drawn for example from the officially published census, agricultural returns and emigration reports) with the qualitative evidence for historical experience contained in the public testimonies collected in the great nineteenth-century Irish social inquiries, included in EPPI, and the more private communications featured in letters to and from migrant families in IED and the oral narratives of migration and return that comprise the NMR. The addition of GIS mapping to support the resources will allow sources relating to specific places to be spatially located and linked across time. It is intended that DIPPAM will facilitate and encourage new kinds of research into modern Irish history through juxtaposing and integrating a variety of sources - quantitative and qualitative, official and unofficial, public and private. Migration history, as a central dimension of the modern Irish historical experience and its impact on Britain and the wider world, will be particularly highlighted by bundling the three resources together, but the combined scope of the three resources extends well beyond migration to the structures of society, demography, religion, the economy and political relations that shaped country that emigrants left. DIPPAM will be built around and guarantee the sustainability of these three 'core' resources in the first instance, one of which (EPPI) is no longer supported by its originating institution, and the other two (IED and NMR) have currently restricted accessibility. However it is also intended to be flexible, and to allow the addition of further relevant virtual libraries for Irish history hosted by QUB in the future. DIPPAM will be an essential resource for academic researchers working on nineteenth-early twentieth-century Irish history, on British-Irish relations, and on Irish migration history since the eighteenth century, but it is equally oriented towards a plethora of non-academic users in Ireland and elsewhere who may lack access to research libraries, especially local and amateur historians and historical societies, family historians and genealogists, secondary level schools and tertiary colleges, and heritage officers and facilitators in the museums, archives and libraries sector and in local government. The project will be run in partnership with the Centre for Migration Studies, based in the National Museums of Northern Ireland, to promote its non-academic impact.

We anticipate that the DIPPAM project will have a lasting impact in the following ways:
1. Building further on an established track-record of significant public impact. The scale of pre-2009 EPPI usage (over five million successful requests in the six months from July 2008) suggests that this resource has already had a major public impact beyond academia and on a global scale. The original EPPI resource was intended as a mass-usage research tool for modern Irish and Irish-diasporic history, freely and universally available to all. The documents it contains (15,000 in total database; 11,500 in full-text) are of key importance to anyone engaged in research (non-academic as much as academic) into the history of Ireland and its people in the period of the Irish-British Union (1801-1922). EPPI rendered these materials accessible to multiple users without access to academic libraries or subscriptions to commercial resources, and fully searchable/browsable by keyword. Key user groups have included: local and amateur historians and history societies, genealogists, schools, heritage officers and facilitators (public and private sector). The permanent discontinuation of the public EPPI web-service by the University of Southampton since July 2009 has deprived large numbers of such users of an established and popular resource (see Case for Support for evidence). EPPI already has a recognised brand-identity among a large community of users - this will be retained and revivified within the larger DIPPAM resource. The other two principal resources to be included in DIPPAM, the IED and NMR, also have a potentially large and global non-academic user community similar to the categories above, but these have until now been limited to password-protected entry and restricted access points.
2. Relaunching the existing resources with further enhancement as part of DIPPAM. This offers the opportunity to expand the user-base for the existing resources through the public launch of the new DIPPAM platform, upgrading and addressing sustainability and comprehensiveness issues with the EPPI resource, and complementing this with the upgraded and fully accessible migration-related resources of IED and NMR. The relaunch of EPPI offers an opportunity to redefine and target key new groups of potential users and facilitators through dissemination and outreach activities, particularly non-professional local and family historians, secondary-level schools, heritage and IT officers in the museums, archives and libraries sectors in Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland and further afield.
3. Engagement with public partner. Queen's University will work with the Centre Migration Studies, Omagh, to promote DIPPAM with non-academic users, especially within Northern Ireland. CMS is a research institute physically based within the National Museums of Northern Ireland, with a research library funded by LibrariesNI. CMS has worked closely with the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland and with QUB in the creation of the IED and NMR resources, and is ideally placed (as part of the Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure (NI) 'family') to mediate between the academic team at QUB and its cultural heritage-sector partners in promoting the new resource to new users. It aslo has close links with the family history community.
4. Ensuring users benefit. The dissemination activities set out in the Impact Plan are directed to maximising the benefit to a wide range of non-academic users. The site will have a user-feedback facility for allowing users to comment on the usability of the resource, raise queries relating to the resources, and suggest potential additions to the collections. User engagement and interaction, specifically in the field of Irish migration studies, is central to the public outreach mission of the Centre for Migration Studies, which will share responsib