A Digital-First Approach for the Kerby A. Miller Collection of Irish emigrant letters and memoirs
Creators: name: Rouget, Marie-Louise
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2025
Subjects: IDCC25
Lightning Talks
Sustainability and strategy: Work on curation processes, techniques, costs, and workflows
Digital curation
Digital archives
Digital-first approach
Open research
Digital research

description: In 2021, the historian Kerby A. Miller donated his collection of research material about Irish immigration to North America and Irish diaspora identities to the University of Galway Library. In March 2024, the first tranche of curated material was released online via a dedicated digital repository, titled Imirce. To make the materials accessible to academic users and the public alike with minimal delay, the Library opted for a digital-first approach. To define digital-first, we mean a methodology and a process that prepares materials for and releases materials to digital channels as our first priority. The foundations for this principle are accessibility and collaboration, in line with the Library’s strategic goals of being digital, driving research and opening scholarship.

In 2023, the entire collection (150,000+ pages) was scanned to develop and test a new digital procedure for the curation, description, ingestion and publication of an archives collection. Since the 1970s, hundreds of letters were shared with Miller which he and his research assistants then photocopied, transcribed and returned to emigrant descendants in Ireland and the USA. Miller understood that these records held significant sentimental value to the individuals he corresponded with, but with the tendency of heirlooms to go astray in the generations that have followed, Miller’s carefully collected derivatives may now represent the last existing versions of these records.

The first phase of the project has focused on Miller’s collection of Irish emigrant letters, and the curation of related pages of:

- digitised typed transcripts created by Miller and team,

- his collected original manuscripts; and

- his collected reproductions (copies) of manuscripts used to create typed transcripts for his research.

An example of a mixed material item can be found here: https://t.ly/ccKax

The proposed 10-min lightning talk will provide insights into the evolving digital curation workflow, including highlights of the following aspects:

- The opportunities and challenges of curating mixed material items (combining pages of Transcripts, Reproductions and/ or Manuscripts into a single digital object)

- Defining the quality methodology for digitally assessing duplicate transcript and reproduction pages for publication to Imirce

- Outlining the approach to Imirce’s search functionality and data visualisations, built on a MODS approach that is archives and DAMS-friendly, and supplemented by OCR transcripts for full text search

- Showing some of the benefits of working on a digital archives collection in an iterative way, with regular releases of newly curated material

Forthcoming: Miller’s collection of emigrant memoirs will be curated and released online in late 2024. The launch of the digital repository also included an open call to the public to contribute new material to ensure the collection's continued growth and relevance. Areas of particular interest are letters written in Irish in North America, and letters and memoirs produced in any language by emigrants from Irish-speaking districts. So far, 35 new donors have come forward, pledging an additional 1,600+ new letters to the corpus.

Imirce is more than a digital archive—it's a bridge connecting scholars, descendants, and curious minds across time and the Atlantic Ocean.

Visit Imirce here: imirce.universityofgalway.ie