A lot of new data in Ireland's Virtual Record Treasury

Question

Lots of new records have been added to Ireland's Virtual Record Treasury over the past several months. Unfortunately there are no release notes, so we don't have a complete record of these.

In particular, there appears to be a large amount of data from the vast collection held by the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) and a large number of items from Analecta Hibernica and Archivum Hibernicum. There are also several new contributing archives.

Some months ago, the Treasury also made some improvements to its system functions. These are described in the Space on the Treasury here. I have not yet updated the space with the bulk of the new data.

Probably of greatest interest to genealogists is new sets of wills and will abstracts, which I have added to the write-up of wills and probate here.

There also appears to be lots of new data on things like muster rolls, poll tax, subsidy rolls, claims of 'innocents', Williamite confiscations etc all of which are discussed in Rebellion, Plantation and War, which I have not yet updated.

Other interesting additions from PRONI include some of the Maxwell Given collection on the history of Coleraine.

And there are various interesting private sets of papers which I may want to add here such as Bishop Reeves' Irish Historical Records held by Trinity College Dublin.

There are also new volumes from the Registry of Deeds (now under Tailte Éireann). These are already available on FamilySearch and via the Registry of Deeds Index project (both discussed here), but they are not searchable there. A complelete, searchable, set of these would be a real boon. But unfortunately the Treasury still only has six of several hundred volumes.

It is worth spending some time browsing through the treasury to find items of interest, although it is still not as useful as it could be if its system features were rather better.

Thanks to John Falvey for bringing some of these items to my attention.

Answer 1

I thought on first use that it was not designed in a user-friendly way at all. Somewhat underwhelmed at the construction of the web site. 

Comments

I rather agree with this, although as explained in the space on the treasury it is better than it was. It is a great shame that lots of good stuff is largely hidden away in places where very few people will ever find it.

I suspect that it was partly let down by not having enough cash to meet its rather grand ambitions, partly by wasting time and money on fancy things like the knowledge graph and virtual reality visit and partly that the IT specialists were hindered by the archivists in charge of the project who thought that they new better than the IT people about how an IT system should be built. Everything is built around hierarchies of archival references. This means that you have to keep on browsing through loads of levels to see whether anything is hidden underneath or whether you have just wasted your time. And it makes the search function much less effective than it should be.

There are lots of ways in which it could be improved significantly. Even so, some things there like John Lodge's abstracts from the court rolls are extremely useful. And it is promising that they have recently made improvements to the system and added a lot of data. One hopes that they carry on with both.