Karlin Lillington: Technology helps piece together archive lost in 1922 Four Courts fire

Last Sunday I found myself in the peaceful setting of the library in Killruddery House, the Wicklow estate of the Brabazon family since 1618. Outside, on the vast lawns, happy chatter from swarms of children filtered through the old windows as it was the estate’s annual end-of-summer picnic. In the library, an audience gathered for a Heritage Week talk on an extraordinary project, the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland (VRTI virtualtreasury.ie).

The VRTI would have been scarcely imaginable when I arrived in Ireland in the 1980s as a postgraduate eager to study Anglo-Irish literature. I recall learning early on that the entire national archive, once held in the Public Record Office at Dublin’s Four Courts — seven centuries of historical records — had been blown up in 1922. This was a staggering loss for Ireland, leaving gaping holes in the historical record to stymie generations of researchers, whether academics delving into Irish history, or individuals trying to trace their family genealogy. Until recently, this loss was simply a sad but accepted fact.

But then came a gradual realisation that, in fact, all was not lost. Developments in technology and digital archiving capabilities were transforming the landscape of the possible. As deputy director of the VRTI, Dr Ciarán Wallace would tell us on Sunday a glorious mix of those long-lost records has been painstakingly recovered for the virtual shelves of the VRTI. More than 85 per cent of some collections of documents that were thought to be lost forever have been retrieved.

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This is an absorbing tale of imagination, diligence, chance discoveries and fruitful relationships with other national archives, many in the UK which hold copies of records here, and myriad small partners such as Killruddery, with its 400 years of documents including land records and correspondence. In his talk, Wallace showed one Killruddery find, a letter from Thomas Cromwell (he of Wolf Hall) to the lord of the estate, signed, improbably, “your loving friend”.

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I first heard about this initiative years ago from Wallace, a longtime friend of mine. He’d stumbled into the growing overlap between technology and research as a TCD postgraduate, working on digital humanities projects such as the digitising of the handwritten 1641 Depositions, and co-designing Trinity’s popular, inaugural massive online open course “Irish Lives in War and Rebellion: 1912-1923″.

He’d then begun working with Dr Peter Crooks, associate professor and senior lecturer in medieval history in TCD, and founding director, along with TCD computer scientist Dr Séamus Lawless, of the VRTI.

In the early 2010s, Crooks had come up with the Circle Project, a virtual reconstruction of Irish chancery letters destroyed in the 1922 Four Courts fire. This was the equivalent of a single Public Records Office shelf from the millions of documents once held there. Out of that inspired kernel, the VRTI would grow.

“It wasn’t intended to but it became a proof of concept,” Wallace tells me. Soon, “mediaevalists in Trinity and elsewhere were saying, surely we could do this with other medieval records”.

Crooks’ Circle Project helpfully clarified the specific technological and academic challenges, Wallace says. As technologies advanced, so did the possibility of realising not just further medieval virtual shelves, but the entire VRTI.

We have practically nothing of pre-Famine census records, versus 85 per cent or more of, say, Cromwellian land records

—  VRTI deputy director Ciarán Wallace

People always ask Wallace how much of the archive has been recovered. “It’s extremely difficult to say,” he says, as no one knows the full scope of what was originally held. There’s great variation in what has been recovered.

“We have practically nothing of pre-Famine census records, versus 85 per cent or more of, say, Cromwellian land records.” Land and property records have been easier to find “because that’s what people fight over in the courts” — so copies were often held elsewhere.

A looming technical challenge is the ephemeral nature of digital storage formats, which inevitably become obsolete. How might records be preserved and accessed in decades or centuries ahead?

As Wallace noted in his talk, people often mistakenly believe that parchment, vellum and paper are the most vulnerable of formats, but physical documents can survive hundreds, even thousands of years. Despite all the extraordinary possibilities technology offers archivists, the 0s and 1s of digital storage are worryingly fragile, and “digital rot” a constant threat. Entire conferences are structured around finding solutions to this ongoing problem, he says.

Perhaps the greatest technical opportunity for archivists lies in artificial intelligence, he adds.

AI can sift through reams of documents and, in just seconds, find, with 80 per cent-plus accuracy, key research data such as place names or people. For a human reader, this is the work of days, weeks or even months. The VRTI’s Dr David Brown is exploring how AIs might be used to transform archival work and research.

The VRTI project, funded through the Department of Culture under the Decade of Centenaries programme, continues to evolve and grow. If you haven’t yet visited, its virtual doors are open to you. A good introduction is the impressive virtual tour of the original building: vrtour.virtualtreasury.ie. The website also offers introductions to numerous collections and themes, guaranteeing many a satisfying digital rabbit hole for lengthier exploration.