Tuesday, 19 December 2017

Library Reading Room - Christmas/New Year Opening Hours


Season's greetings to all from the Library Staff

If you are planning on studying over the festive period the Library Reading Room at basement level will be open as follows:

  • Saturday 23rd - Sunday 24th December 2017: 07.00 - midnight

  • Monday 25th - Tuesday 26th December 2017: Closed

  • Wednesday 27th - Sunday 31st December 2017: 07.00 - midnight

  • Monday 1st January 2018: Closed

  • Tuesday 2nd January 2018: 07.00 - midnight

Wednesday 3rd January 2018 onwards normal opening hours (07.00 - 02.30) resume
 


Thursday, 14 December 2017


New Library Management System
Important Notice

Due to the installation of a new Library Management System, the following Library services will be unavailable from Friday, 15 December, 1730 until Tuesday, 19 December, 0900:
 
  • Library User Accounts
  • Real-time information regarding items on loan or their availability
  • Book circulation via Self Issue and High Use Books machines.  Please note however that you can borrow a book by coming to the Library & IT Service Desk during Library opening hours.
  • Inter-Library Loans
  • Booking of Group Study Rooms
  • Placing of hold requests
  • Online book renewal
  • Online fine payment facilities
We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.

More information is available here.
Should you have any queries, please contact
Service Desk -Tel. 091-495777 or Email servicedesk@nuigalway.ie

Monday, 20 November 2017

Westlaw UK Off Campus Problems


There's currently a global problem for Westlaw UK which prevents people from accessing the resource from off-campus.

While the issue is being fixed, we have a temporary workaround. Just look for Westlaw in the Library catalogue, and follow the instructions on the page that appears.

Wednesday, 15 November 2017

Explore your Archive



James Hardiman Library

 invites you to


Explore your Archive


  Wednesday 22nd November
11:30-13:00
 (Bridge Room), Hardiman Research Building
Four of NUIG Library Archivists will give a 10-minute talk (see below) and you will have an opportunity to view exhibits and ask questions.
Tea/Coffee will be served from 11:30 


Muintir na Tíre Periodical literature – Fiona Kearney



Muintir na Tíre is a national voluntary organisation dedicated to promoting the process of community development. The archive consists of material from the foundation of Muintir na Tíre Limited in 1931,the foundation of Muintir na Tíre in 1937 to the end of the 20th century.

Sir Peter Freyer - Kieran Hoare

Sir Peter Freyer was born on 2 July 1851 and was baptized in the parish church at Ballinakill, Co Galway on 26 July.  He was the eldest of the children of Samuel Freyer, a small landholder of Sellerna, near Cleggan and his wife Celia Burke.   He went to the Erasmus Smith School in Galway and won a scholarship to attend the Queen’s College, Galway.    He had a distinguished academic career at the College, obtaining in 1872 a first-class honour degree in Arts and winning the gold medal, two years later he was awarded his M.D., again coming first in his class. He worked in the Indian Medical Service from 1877 to 1894, becoming a specialist in urological surgery. On his return he set up in private practice in Harley St., becoming involved in the training of the Army Medical Corps among other things in the early twentieth century. He was active as a supervisor of a number of army hospitals during World War One. He died on 9 September 1921, aged 70 and is buried beside his father in the Church of Ireland cemetery at Clifden, Co Galway.

  

The Rynne Family Archive: Ireland Through Generations - Barry Houlihan



The Rynne family archive comprises records of multiple generations of a family which had formative roles in shaping Irish culture and society from the Revolutionary era through to recent years. Dr Michael Rynne, a veteran of the War of Independence also served as Irish ambassador to Spain in the Free State; his sister Mary, was a prominent writer and playwright at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. Michael’s son, Etienne, was Professor of Archaeology at NUI Galway, a position he held for thirty years. This talk explores the processes of preserving and cataloguing this vast family collection





 Michael Maurice O'Shaughnessy: Engineering the Promised Land - Aisling Keane


The Michael Maurice O'Shaughnessy archive is the basis for an exhibition that is currently on display in the Hardiman foyer, Michael Maurice O'Shaughnessy 1864-1934: Engineering the Promised Land. It tells the story of the Limerick man, who in 1884 graduated from Queen's College Galway as NUI Galway was known at the time. He emigrated to California the following year, where he enjoyed an illustrious career as a civil engineer. From 1912-1932 he served as San Francisco's City Engineer. In this role he oversaw iconic projects in the region, including San Francisco's hydro-electric power scheme, and he approved the concept for the Golden Gate Bridge. The archive offers a window into the life of an Irish emigrant in America in the late 19th century, and documents a fascinating time of  development in America.

Tuesday, 31 October 2017

Muintir na Tíre involved in Community Alert and Community Enterprise Development

Muintir na Tíre have been involved in many initiatives and projects throughout its history. Some of the projects they have been involved in include rural electrification, building of community halls and centres, EEC Pilot Project for the Training of Trainers and The Tidy Towns competition. Further information on the many projects they have been involved in can be found here.

Some of the files that I have recently catalogued have dealt with two big initiatives that Muintir na Tíre have been involved in. Both of these initiatives involved community development and empowering the local community to work together.

The first initiative is Community Alert which Muintir na Tíre are still involved with today. Muintir na Tíre became involved with Community Crime Prevention back in 1985. The idea of Community Alert was Muintir’s response to a number of vicious attacks on elderly people in 1984 and 1985 in rural Ireland. 



Muintir na Tíre worked with An Garda Síochana to establish the community crime prevention programme. Neighbourhood Watch had been introduced in urban areas in 1984 and Community Alert was launched in 1985 for rural areas.

 

Community Alert was organised by local community councils or interested local people with the help of a Muintir na Tíre Development Officer and a Garda. Community Alert road signs were erected in local areas and a local campaign was established.


Funding for Community Alert was provided by government departments including Department of Social, Family and community Affairs, Department of Health and Children and Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform.

The files in the collection give us a great understanding of the development of community alert and how Muintir na Tíre were to the forefront of its development. To find out more about the Community Text Alert Scheme run by Muintir na Tíre today visit here.

The second initiative that Muintir na Tíre was involved in was with the Youth Employment Agency. They employed an Enterprise Development Officer to work with community groups to establish community enterprises to create jobs in the local community.

The beginnings of an initiative to have full time staff involved in community development training began with the EEC Pilot Project in the 1970s but it was not until the mid 1980s that they got to initiate the initiative. Through the support and financial backing of the Youth Employment Agency, which later became FÁS, they were able to employ a full time Enterprise Development Officer. 

 

This work was led by Eamon O’Sullivan, the Enterprise Development Officer, and he worked with numerous community groups such as Burgess Community Enterprise Group, Castletownroache Community Enterprise Co-op, Galbally Community Enterprise Group and Tallow Community Enterprise Group.


The files detail the work that Eamon did with each group to investigate and establish various community enterprises. They also detail how the state agencies were working with different groups to improve the unemployment situation that was in Ireland during the 1980s.

 

The programme ran until 1988 and while there was some success with industries formed by local Enterprise groups not all groups involved in the programme were a success. The files provide us with great insight into the programme and how Muintir na Tíre worked with government departments. The programme was another example of how Muintir na Tíre was always working with communities to be self-reliant.

There are many more examples of the initiatives that Muintir na Tíre were involved in in the collection and this shows the impact and involvement that they have had on Irish society in their 80 year history. 

Monday, 23 October 2017

Open Library of Humanities (OLH) - An Open Access Initiative


The James Hardiman Library is a member of the Open Library of Humanities (OLH). The OLH's mission is to make scholarly publishing fairer, more accessible, and rigorously preserved for the digital future. It is a charitable organisation dedicated to publishing open access scholarship with no author-facing article processing charges (APCs).

The OLH's publishing platform supports academic journals from across the humanities disciplines, as well as hosting its own multidisciplinary journal, Open Library of Humanities. All of OLH's academic articles are subject to rigorous peer review and the scholarship it publishes showcases some of the most dynamic research taking place in the humanities disciplines including:
  • digital humanities
  • film and new media studies
  • history
  • modern languages and cultures
  • philosophy
  • political theory
  • sociology
OLH's articles benefit from the latest advances in online journal publishing – with high-quality presentation, annotative functionality, robust digital preservation, strong discoverability and easy-to-share social media buttons.
Access to all these journals is available from OLH or via the library catalogue

Collection Development
James Hardiman Library

Friday, 15 September 2017

Culture Night 2017




This year’s culture night takes place on the 22 September. Culture night is an annual all-island public event that celebrates culture, creativity and the arts. The James Hardiman Library is holding an evening of talks and an exhibition to celebrate culture. The focus of the talks is on community development with the focus on materials from the Muintir na Tíre collection as well as volumes from the 19th century printed collections.

The James Hardiman Library’s collections hold a rich source of material on local and community studies. In the archives we have collections from The Abbey Theatre, The Gate Theatre, Professor Kevin Boyle, Brendan Duddy, Ritchie-Pickow, Éamon de Buitléar, Tim Robinson and Druid Theatre company to name but a few. The James Hardiman Library has recently acquired the archive of Muintir na Tíre, a national voluntary organisation dedicated to promoting the process of community development. A series of blogs have been written about the work to date of making the collection accessible for researchers.



The Muintir na Tíre talk will look at Rural Ireland and Landmark two publications of Muintir na Tíre and discuss how they promoted community development before and after the United Nations definition in 1958. These will also be on display in the exhibition. Community development in Galway and the West of Ireland will be discussed as well during the talk. Much earlier attempts at community development in Galway will be addressed in the talk on James Hardiman and his involvement with organisations such as the Royal Galway Institution.

Venue: Room G010, Hardiman Research Building

Talks:
18.30: “Muintir na Tíre Periodical literature”.  Speaker: Fiona Kearney, Archivist

19.30: “James Hardiman, historian of Galway” Speaker: Marie Boran, Special Collections Librarian

We hope you can come along and join us for the evening.


Tuesday, 12 September 2017

Bible returns to Galway - after 154 years!

The library hosted a pleasant hand-over event on 8 September, when members of the extended Colohan family, living in Australia and the UK, visited Special Collections. They were here to present us with a bible that had first left Galway 154 years ago, when it was presented to John Colohan by his father, Professor Nicholas Colohan. John had graduated in Medicine from what was then Queen's College, Galway in 1857. He subsequently took a post as Surgeon General in the British Army. His work took him to various parts of the world including South Africa, before he settled in Australia. His descendant, Seán Colohan, and his family, have now decided that the bible should be kept in the care of the library's Special Collections. They had first visited the University on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of its opening in 1999 and have been back to Galway several times since. Our picture shows Seán with the historic bible. On his right is Monica Crump, our Head of Collections, and to his left are Sean's wife, Narelle, his cousin, Mimi Colohan from London, Marie Boran, Special Collections Librarian, and Prof. Tadhg Foley, formerly of the Discipline of  English, who facilitated the visit.

Friday, 1 September 2017

Muintir na Tíre's financial and governance records

In my last blog I wrote about the various stages of work that an archivist does in preparing a collection to make it accessible in the reading room. Having completed the arrangement (almost) I have now started describing the collection. These descriptions will provide researchers with sign posts to what is contained in a file or bound volume.

The material I have been cataloguing in the collection so far has been mainly financial records and governance records of Muintir na Tíre. The financial records of Muintir na Tíre contain various ledgers detailing membership, income and expenditure, annual reports and petty cash books. The annual reports of Muintir na Tíre date back as far as 1945. Below is an example of the annual report from 1974. These records provide a great understanding of the financial position of Muintir na Tíre throughout its history.   

 

  

  


The ledgers dealing with membership provide us with the details of the guilds and community councils who registered as members with Muintir na Tíre. The Guild’s Ledgers contain information on the subscriptions that guilds had for Landmark. Below is an example of this. All this valuable information provides us with evidence of the number of guilds/community councils that were members of Muintir na Tíre down through the years. We can ascertain the history of guilds/community councils for the last 80 years from these records as well.


A constitution has been used as the governing method of Muintir na Tíre since its foundation. The constitution has been amended over the years to reflect the development and different ways of working of Muintir na Tíre. In 1996, Muintir na Tíre became a Company Limited by Guarantee and now has a memorandum of understanding and articles of association. They developed guidelines on setting up a community council and they provided a template for the constitution they required if setting up the council as a company limited by guarantee. Examples of some of the constitutions is provided below. 

   

 


We also get an understanding of the election process in Muintir na Tíre. The Honorary Returning Officer was a busy person organising and managing the election process from the nominations to confirming the names of those elected. We see the variety of individual who were nominated and got involved in the National Council.

 


Finally, we also get an understanding of the decisions made by the National Council of Muintir na Tíre. The minutes of the National Executive committee meetings provide the eveidence of the decisions made by the leadership of Muintir na Tíre down through the years. They also show the many discussions that took place on various issues that faced Muintir na Tíre and the many projects they got involved in.




These records provide us with the evidence of how Muintir na Tíre was governed over its 80 year history. The descriptions for these records have been written and while you have to wait until the collection as a whole is catalogued before they are available for consultation, you can start thinking about how you can use this wonderful collection for your research purposes. 



Thursday, 31 August 2017

Who is Katie Roche? - From the Archives

Programme from opening night, 'Katie Roche', 1936, Abbey Theatre Digital Archive
The story of the eponymous young woman of the play, Katie Roche, is often unbeknown to Irish theatre audiences. Lesser known still is the story of the play’s author, Teresa Deevy. One could be forgiven for confusing the stories of both women, Roche and Deevy – their stories interchangeable where either’s considerable talent and ability were left unfulfilled by demonstrable forces beyond their control. Authority has a habit of getting in the way.

Such was the case for both Deevy and her play Katie Roche. First performed at the Abbey Theatre in March 1936, the play’s opening night review in the Evening Herald included the following remarks: “The point of the play, if point there is, is most evasive. It seems to be little more than a clever psychological study of a girl who gives her name to the piece.” This critic who describes Katie as a “complex creature as near to insanity as makes no difference” spent most of the review trying to define Katie herself, describing her as full of “gamin elfishness . . . queer, fiery, and at times a pitiful character.” We are still left quite unaware of Katie's story or of who she is or the fate that befalls her.
Screenshot from Abbey Theatre Digital Archive, NUI Galway

Deevy’s play presents a young woman, Katie, who as born out of wedlock, is depicted as someone who is somehow, incomplete, unknowable or wild. In marrying an older man, Stanislaus Gregg, an artist of renown, Katie untimely succumbs to the pressures of conformity, to a play ' a role' as a wife and within a family.  

As a reader of this review some eight decades later, one would be none much the wiser as to knowing who Katie is, or what she experienced, or what Deevy sought to accomplish with the play. In fact, the review concludes that the “the people in it are unprobable beings in an unprobable world of their own.” The ‘improbable world’ world the reviewer speaks of relates more to conservative Ireland of the 1930s of which the play is both a product of and a response against. Fintan O’Toole writes that: “It is easy enough to see that she didn’t fit in with the increasingly reactionary atmosphere of the national theatre, however, and that her work raises startlingly blunt questions about the role of women in Éamon de Valera’s Ireland.”

Image from 1975 production of 'Katie Roche'. Abbey Theatre Digital Archive 
The play was one of the most popular at the Abbey theatre throughout the 1930s and foregrounded Waterford-born Deevy as a playwright of much promise, vision and talent. But all would not be so. Newly digitised records from the Abbey Theatre Digital Archive, available at the Hardiman library, NUI Galway, allow researchers a new opportunity to study the history of this play and of Teresa Deevy herself. Research by Abbey Theatre Digital Archive Fellow, Tricia O’Beirne, who transcribed the minute books of the first thirty-five years of the Abbey Board as part of a digitisation project discovered that:

In one of the last entries to the minute books, on the 28 April 1939, Teresa Deevy, the playwright who gave the Abbey one of their most successful plays of the thirties in Katie Roche, is rather mysteriously dismissed from her contract. Previous academic research has tended to place Deevy’s break with the Abbey in the early 1940s, when she submitted Wife to James Whelan which was rejected by Blythe, but here is evidence that in response to her inquiring about her play Holiday House, which had been accepted by the board a year previously, the board decide not to produce it ‘and agreed that the contract with Miss Deevy should be allowed to lapse’. This terminology is not employed elsewhere in the minutes and no explanation is given for the dropping of one of their most popular and critically acclaimed playwrights.

Deevy’s involvement with the Abbey theatre, as a playwright of other new work at least, ends with Katie Roche. After its premiere in 1936, the play was revived in 1937, 1938, 1949, 1953, 1954, 1975 and 1994, before being revived currently on the Abbey stage in 2017. The production history and records of the play, newly digitised for the first time at NUI Galway, reveal how this play, much loved by its original audiences has faded into a sporadic production over the subsequent decades.

From the original production, the stage management files, revealing sketches and drawings of the stage and set, lists of props, cue-sheets for lighting and sound, also included detailed annotation down to the detail of the colour of carpets and curtains used on set. In the absence of photographs, for example, these records are an invaluable account of the original staging which was produced by Hugh Hunt and designed by Tania Moiseiwitsch and provide evidence as to why it struck a chord with both audiences and to those who may have considered Katie “a wild” and dangerous figure for modern Ireland.
Stage management files, 1936, 'Katie Roche', Abbey Theatre Digital Archive


Later records, such as prompt-scripts, give further opportunity to follow how the play was and could be mounted, giving an indication of the craft of Deevy the playwright and evidence as to just why exactly she was known as a playwright of such ability before her contract was “allowed to lapse” in such a crude manner.
Digitised audio reels, 1975, 'Katie Roche' Abbey Theatre Digital Archive


Audio visual records, such as audio files from productions in the 1980s and 1990s give a chance for the first time to hear how the play was scored and a how music and affects were integrated into the production. A video recording of the 1994 production of Katie Roche, on the Peacock stage, starring Dearbhla Crotty in the titular role of Katie, brings the archive story of the play full-circle, allowing us to watch, hear and experience, as far as possible, the play in action and brought to life from the past. More than eighty years after the play was first performed, the archive and records of the play’s production and its reception can bring us closer to knowing more about the complex stories of both Katie Roche and Teresa Deevy.

The transcribed minute books of the Board of the Abbey Theatre 1904 - 1939 are available here.

Tuesday, 29 August 2017

The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson Online - new resource









The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson Online is now available.

This online resource includes:
  • c.80 old-spelling texts
  • 550 contextual documents
  • 88 essays
  • several hundred high-quality images
  • 100 music scores
  • details of more than 1,300 stage performances
  • cross-linked bibliography of over 7,000 items
 
The print edition was published by Cambridge University Press in 2012. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson Online contains a wealth of additional content, including the recently discovered diary of Jonson's 'Foot Voyage' to Scotland, extra letters written to Jonson, early attempts at a biography, further material relating to the masques and poems and numerous contemporary references to Jonson's works and reputation.

This resource can be accessed via the library catalogue or directly via the link here.


Collection Development

Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom - online archive now available

Fulltext access to every issue of Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom from Volume 1, Issue 1, 1887 onwards is now available.

Journal of the Marine Biological Association UK (JMBA) is an international journal, publishing original research and reviews on all aspects of marine biology, to support the aims of the MBA.

The areas covered by JMBA include:
  • Marine ecology, behaviour and fisheries
  • Biodiversity and population studies of marine ecosystems, especially potential impacts of global warming, ocean acidification and climate change on ecosystem resilience
  • Physiology, biochemistry, genetics and molecular biology of marine organisms, including microbiology, particularly related to the integrative ecophysiology of marine organisms
  • Taxonomic syntheses, including molecular phylogenies
  • Morphology, life history and developmental biology of marine organisms, especially model systems
  • Chemical and physical oceanography, as directly relevant to marine biology
  • Marine environmental health, and in particular its relationship to human health and well-being

This journal can be accessed via the library catalogue or directly via the link here.


Collection Development

 
 
 
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