This document discusses plans for a project called "Beyond 2022" which aims to digitize archival records from Irish repositories and make them more accessible online. It provides an overview of the destruction of the Public Record Office of Ireland in 1922 during the Irish Civil War which destroyed many important historical documents. The project will create digital archives, transcripts, indexes, and virtual reality models to help researchers access information from unsaved archival materials. It will involve partnerships between archival institutions and computer scientists to develop new digital tools to analyze and interact with the archival sources.

1. Beyond 2022:
Emerging from a
century of lockdown
Ciarán Wallace,
Deputy Director, Beyond 2022
DRI: Using Digital Archives for
Academic Research
23 February 2021

2. Irish Record
Commissioners
(1810-1830)
A catalogue of
unsuitable repositories

3. Public Record Office of Ireland: Record House and Record Treasury.
Mills Album (1914) National Archives of Ireland
Fire break

4. Public Record Office of Ireland:
Record Treasury interior
Mills Album (1914) National Archives of Ireland
The Searchers

5. PROI Search Room
Mills Album (1914) National Archives of Ireland
Entrance through the
fire-break to the
Record Treasury

6. Irish Free State troops
shelling anti-Treaty forces
in the Four Courts, Dublin
28-30 June 1922
South Dublin County Libraries

7. The PROI roofless and ablaze
30 June 1922
UCD Archives

8. Irish
Architectural
Archive

9. Beyond 2022 Core Partners
Archival
Researchers in
• Dublin
• London
• Belfast
Computer Science
research team

10. Rare originals pulled from
the rubble
‘Salved Records’ collection,
National Archives of Ireland
& Irish Manuscripts Commission
… surviving copies,
transcripts, indexes,
finding aids etc.

11. Irish Record Commission (1810–30)
Reuniting one vast scattered collection
California – Huntington Library
Trinity College Library
Royal Irish Academy
Maynooth University Library
National Archives of Ireland
350+ volumes
25+ million
words

12. Archival wanderings: Medieval records from 1291 transcribed c. 1740.
The original was lost in the PROI fire, this earlier transcript survived
in the RDS Library and is now in the NLI.
Harris papers, National Library of Ireland.

13. This book was destroyed in the
great fire in the Record Office
Huguenot Records in
Marsh’s Library, Dublin

14. Virtual model
Interior of Record Treasury

15. Virtual model
of the Search Room

16. Transkribus
Automated
Handwritten Text Recognition
- from words to data.
ORIGINAL
TRANSCRIPTION

17. Virtual Reality
model of the
destroyed
Record Treasury
Creating a Knowledge Graph for Irish History

18. Enabling researchers to dig deeper in the records

19. Visit us at www.Beyond2022.ie
Follow us on:
@beyond_2022
@Beyond2022
Try out the VR prototype at https://beyond2022.ie/vr/