CEPH’s Associate Director for Data and Archives Ronan Lyons has been awarded a Royal Irish Academy Nowlan Digitisation Grant for a new historical data digitisation project. The project, titled ‘The Digitisation and Restoration of the Database of Irish Historical Statistics’, will resurrect the Historical National Accounting Group’s (HNAG) historical database which was deleted in 2015. The grant, to the value of €9,400, will fund the personnel and digitisation services required to make these data freely available, accessible, interoperable and reusable in line with the FAIR Principles for scientific data.

The original HNAG database contained dozens of Irish historical data series, ranging from nineteenth-century trade statistics to rates of police pay in 1902. Its loss was a serious blow to independent and academic researchers, and CEPH is delighted to be spearheading its renewal in association with the Royal Irish Academy. CEPH will host this database on our website from 2024 onwards, and will ensure its survivability long into the future.

The Royal Irish Academy Nowlan Digitisation Grant, which is funded by a generous bequest from Kevin B. Nowlan, aims to expand the range of digitised historical sources available through open and free access to researchers, for private study or education purposes. This year the scheme was open to applications from researchers in the field of Irish History and the four projects, which must make their digital outputs and metadata available to the Royal Irish Academy for inclusion in the Digital Repository of Ireland cover diverse areas in terms of both topic and era.