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The Book of Kells from the RTÉ Archives, 1989

The Book of Kells is obviously one of the best-known treasures of the Library, so it’s always nice to see it mentioned by the media.

This gem from 1989 is from the “teenage entertainment show” Jo-Maxi, and discusses how the Book of Kells was reproduced for printed facsimile copies – the images taken then are what formed the basis of the later DVD, app and online versions.

The Librarian of the time being interviewed, Peter Fox, is the author of Trinity College Library Dublin: A History.

Enjoy!


New online resource: Goodman Manuscripts (free resource)

Goodman Manuscripts FREE resource, launched October 2016.laoidh-na-buadhachta-beag

James Goodman (1828-1896), a native of Dingle, Co. Kerry, was a student and later, the Professor of Irish (appointed in 1879), at Trinity College Dublin. He was also a canon of the Church of Ireland. During his lifetime he compiled an exceptional collection of Irish traditional music and song and four manuscripts were deposited in TCD Library following his death. A further two manuscripts came to light more recently, and they too have been deposited in TCD Library.

In collaboration with TCD, the Irish Traditional Music Archive (ITMA) has digitised, and made freely available online, the six manuscript volumes now kept in TCD Library. The manuscripts contain over 2,000 melodies and upwards of 80 songs or poems. These were compiled by Canon Goodman from the oral, manuscript and printed sources at his disposal in mid-19th century southern Ireland.

This digital project enhances the published scholarly editions Tunes of the Munster Pipers Volume 1 and Volume 2 edited by Hugh and Lisa Shields (ITMA, 1998 & 2013)

There is interactive score access via Port

There is access to the Goodman Manuscripts from the Library’s Databases and E-Books page and also under the section, New Resources there.

Read the Music Librarian, Roy Stanley’s article on the Goodman Manuscripts on the M&ARL blog.

Library Closed, Monday 31 October

Happy Halloween!As usual, the Library will be closed for the October Holiday, Monday 31 October. Reading rooms will reopen on Tuesday at their normal hours.

Kinsella Hall and the 1937 Postgraduate Reading Room will remain open to Trinity staff and students throughout Monday. The Old Library and Book of Kells Exhibition is also open to visitors.

 

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Retrieving the Real Frederick May

Public lecture, 10 October 18:30, the Long Room Hub

The reputation of composer Frederick May (1911 – 1985) has just received a major boost. A key piece of his work, the long-lost Symphonic Ballad, has been unearthed from the archives in the Library of Trinity College Dublin by musicologist and Long Room Hub Visiting Fellow Dr Mark Fitzgerald of DIT. It received the full National Concert Hall treatment this September.

May is second from left.
May is second from left.

A public lecture about his research will be given by Dr Fitzgerald in the Hub on Monday 10 October at 18:30. The story of Frederick May’s life, as a musician and an outsider – being gay, Protestant, and Republican – casts new light on narratives of Irishness and modernity in Irish culture.

Early Irish Manuscripts Project Shortlisted for Major Award

Some of you may already know about the Early Irish Manuscripts Project, a conservation, research and digitisation campaign focused on four of the Library’s most important early medieval insular Gospel Books funded by the Bank of America Merrill Lynch Art Conservation Project.

We are delighted that the Bank of America, Merrill Lynch & Trinity College Dublin have been shortlisted for the Allianz Business to Arts Award 2016 for Best Large Sponsorship. The three other contenders are projects spearheaded by Sky, An Post and RTÉ, so keep your fingers crossed as the competition is tough!

The Awards will take place on Monday, September 19th 2016 at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre. Time to dust off our dinner jackets and ballgowns…

The Great War Revisited – Major New Online Exhibition, Partnered with Google Cultural Institute

A slide from the new exhibition

Rare and previously unpublished material held in the Library of Trinity College Dublin relating to WW1 will be brought to a global audience thanks to an online collaboration between Trinity and Google.

RTE-30-06-15
Segment from Six One News, June 30th 2015. Copyright Raidió Teilifís Éireann 2015.
Click to go to video.

The Great War Revisited exhibition was launched online on Tuesday, June 30th 2015 at the Google Cultural Institute. This exhibition features 60 exhibits of unique heritage material from Trinity’s rare books and manuscripts collections relating to the Great War, including recruiting posters, letters, diaries, photographs, videos, pamphlets and artworks.

These highlights from the Library’s rich and diverse collections of material relating to the First World War can now be easily accessed by anyone wherever they are in world, right from their computer, tablet or phone. The Great War Revisited is Trinity’s first collaboration with Google Cultural Institute, which partners with more than 800 institutions – museums, libraries, art galleries and archives – around the world. The platform hosts over 170,000 artworks and a total of 6 million photos, videos, manuscripts and other documents of art, culture and history, to make important cultural material available and accessible to everyone.

Highlights of the exhibition include:

  • Trinity’s celebrated collection of Irish WWI recruiting posters (one of the largest collection in existence)
  • Previously unpublished photographs of the Allied campaign in Iraq and Turkey
  • Letters and diaries from Irish soldiers serving in France, Iraq and Palestine (previously unpublished)
  • A multitude of political pamphlets, songs and ballads and artworks

Commenting on the launch of the online exhibition Helen Shenton, Librarian and College Archivist, said: “The Library of Trinity College Dublin is delighted to be partnering with Google Cultural Institute on the Great War Revisited online exhibition. Showcasing the richness of First World War material held in the Library, the online exhibition forms part of the Library’s commitment to opening up its historic collections for global online access.”

The exhibition is part of the Library’s contribution to the Trinity College Dublin Decade of Commemoration initiative which includes lectures and conferences and a rededication of the Hall of Honour later this year.

Launch of “The St Cuthbert Gospel: Studies on the Insular Manuscript of the Gospel of John”

St Cuthbert Gospel24 June saw the launch of The St Cuthbert Gospel: Studies on the Insular Manuscript of the Gospel of John edited by Dr Claire Breay, from the British Library, and our own Dr Bernard Meehan.

The St Cuthbert Gospel is the earliest intact European book and is a landmark in the cultural history of western Europe.

Want more details? See the expanded post on our Manuscripts at Trinity blog.

Trinity Contributes Highlights of Clarke Stained Glass Studio Archive to Digital Repository of Ireland

Colour design for House of Gold and Spiritual Vessel, by Terence Clarke, Board of Trinity College Dublin

Beautiful sketches, designs and photographs from the famed Clarke Stained Glass Studios held in archive in the Library of Trinity College Dublin are now freely available online as part of a major national open digital repository for Ireland’s social and cultural data. For a selection taken from the fuller range see the Library’s mini online exhibition.

The Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI), which was launched by Damien English, Minister for Skills, Research and Innovation on June 25th, contains tens of thousands of high quality, metadata-rich digital objects, including video clips, photographs, digitised manuscripts, oral histories, sound recordings, digitised paintings and museum objects, books and letters. The repository links together and preserves both historical and contemporary data held by Irish institutions, providing a central online access point and interactive multimedia tools

DRI is available for use by the public, students and scholars. The repository is the result of nearly four years of research, software development, policy and legal framework design, and data curation by digital archivists and librarians. Trinity College Dublin has been a key partner in DRI, contributing technical, archiving, metadata and legal expertise to the project. Other partners in the consortium are the Royal Irish Academy (lead institute), Maynooth University, Dublin Institute of Technology, National University of Ireland Galway, and National College of Art and Design.

The repository features beautiful and moving collections, including those from five demonstrator projects – the Clarke Stained Glass Studios Archive, Letters of 1916, Irish Lifetimes, Kilkenny Design Workshops, Saol Agus Saothar Sa Ghaeltacht, and the Teresa Deevy Archive. The repository also contains the award-winning Inspiring Ireland collections, featuring content from eight of Ireland’s National Cultural Institutions, and rich collections of multi-media content from our partners Raidió Teilifís Éireann and the Contemporary Music Centre.

The Clarke Stained Glass Studio Archive held by the Library of Trinity College Dublin sheds light on the design and business practice of one of the leading creative businesses of the 20th century, which operated from 1893 until 1973 and was responsible for hundreds of stained glass windows for churches all over Ireland, the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, several African countries, Singapore, and the Philippines.

With the support of the Digital Repository of Ireland project funding, the Library of Trinity College Dublin is currently undertaking a two-year digitisation project which will make thousands of sketches, designs, order books, photographs and business correspondence from this collection available online to researchers, art historians and the public. This work is being carried out by Dr Marta Bustillo, Assistant Librarian, and Joanne Carroll, Digital Photographer of the Digital Resources and Imaging Services Department in the Library.

Dermot Frost, Principal Investigator for DRI in Trinity with responsibility for the technical delivery of the repository said: “Building DRI has been both exciting and challenging. The team in Research IT, along with our partners, have built a scalable and robust digital repository for humanities and social sciences data using best-of-breed open source software components such as Fedora Commons, Hydra and Ceph.”

Helen Shenton, College Librarian and Archivist added, “Through our involvement in DRI, the Library has been able to unearth the treasures of the Clarke Stained Glass Studios Archive. The high resolution imaging of the business archives and designs for stained glass windows will be a vital resource to future researchers and the wider public.”

Speaking at the launch, Dr Sandra Collins, Director of DRI, invited everyone to visit DRI online: “DRI offers exciting historical, cultural and contemporary content that tells the story of Ireland and its people. The content comes from some of the finest institutions across Ireland, and is available without charge for people to view and to enjoy. Some of the collections we care for are restricted by copyright or the sensitive nature of the data, but researchers can request access. We are an open repository, and we want people to explore and enjoy their cultural and social heritage.”

History Books in the Anglo-Norman World – Online Exhibition

History Books in the Anglo-Norman World ExhibitionThe Library presents a mini online exhibition to highlight our collection of Anglo-Norman histories. This follows the History Books in the Anglo-Norman World Conference in May 2015 and a mini exhibition in the Long Room, organised as part of Dr Laura Cleaver’s History Books in the Anglo-Norman World Project (2011-2015).

The past was a popular subject in the Anglo-Norman world. Following the conquest of England in 1066, historians in the territories controlled by the kings of England sought to legitimise the new regime and make sense of the political circumstances in which they found themselves by exploring both the recent and distant past. Writers used a range of precedents in shaping their accounts, drawing on sources including the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, histories of the dukes of Normandy, and genealogical histories derived from the Bible. Although some works composed in the early twelfth century were primarily designed for use within a particular monastery, others, such as the histories produced by monks John at Worcester and William at Malmesbury, were widely copied and taken up by later generations of writers including Ralph of Diss and Matthew Paris. The surviving ‘history books’ vary significantly in size, format, quality of materials used and decoration. The study of these manuscripts thus sheds light on both the creation and reception of history in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

Trinity College Dublin holds an important collection of Anglo-Norman histories, most of which came from the collection of Archbishop James Ussher (d. 1656). Ussher was a keen collector of manuscripts, and his interest in history was linked to his attempt to establish the date of Creation, which he famously concluded must have taken place in 4004 BC. Ussher’s collection was given to Trinity College Library in 1661.