In 2020, as a response to the Lockdown, Trinity College Library invited members of the University to send in personal records reflecting their experiences. The response was wonderful and all the photographs, poetry, craftwork, and videos which were received will be used by future historians of the pandemic.
The Library continues to add to its collection of personal records relating to the pandemic and another tranche of child-authored material has just been donated. St Patrick’s Loreto Primary School, Bray initiated a social history programme with the children from Junior infants to sixth class (aged between 4 and 12 years of age). This project encouraged the children to record, in text or image, their memories of Lockdown.
Breda Dunleavy, the teacher who designed the project, in agreement with the school’s Board of Management and the children’s parents, approached the Library to donate the material to the Library, so that it would survive to become a permanent part of Ireland’s record of this global health crisis.
This week Breda Dunleavy brought some of the young children into Trinity College for a formal handover of the material. She believes ‘the books are a wonderful compilation of all that was both positive and negative for the children during the pandemic and I am delighted that they will form part of the “Living in Lockdown” project collection in Trinity for another generation to read, exclaim over and reflect upon’.
Further details of this new and welcome acquisition can be found on the Research Collections blog.