September's PRONI stakeholder forum meeting - latest developments

I was unable to make the September meeting of the stakeholder forum at the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (www.nidirect.gov.uk/proni) in Belfast, so am grateful to Gavin McMahon for a copy of the minutes. Some headlines:

1) Digitised church records have been available to view on PRONI's on-site computer system (CALM) from 25/08/2017. See https://britishgenes.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/details-of-new-digitised-church-records.html for further details of what has been digitised.

2) New Accessions recently brought into PRONI and catalogued:

D4343 – Sam Hanna Bell Papers
D4642 – Michael J Murphy Papers
D4644 – Donaghadee free schools
D4645 - Augher Co-op Society papers

3) Campbell College has been awarded a Heritage Lottery Fund grant of almost £90,000 for a digitisation and education project, in partnership with PRONI. As part of the project, photographs of the 126 Campbell College students who served and died in the First World War will transfer to PRONI and be digitised, with copies returned to the college. Campbell College will work with schools throughout East Belfast for the education element of the project.

4) In Summer 2018 PRONI will host 10 interns, each on 2-week placements, where they will be given hands-on experience with cataloguing, digitisation, etc.

5) The first 14 audio recordings for the new Prisons Memory Archive will hopefully be going online by the end of this year.

6) The PRONI Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/publicrecordofficeni/) now has over 1600 followers. [Update - they are well past 2100 followers now!]

I'm hoping to make it to next week's meeting in Belfast, and will provide further updates from then.

(With thanks to Gavin)

Chris

My next 5 week long Scotland 1750-1850: Beyond the OPRs course commences Nov 6th 2017 - details at https://www.pharostutors.com/details.php?coursenumber=302. For my genealogy guide books, visit http://britishgenes.blogspot.co.uk/p/my-books.html, whilst details of my research service are at www.ScotlandsGreatestStory.co.uk. Further content is also published daily on The GENES Blog Facebook page at www.facebook.com/BritishGENES.