Challenge

During the Irish Civil War in 1922, a fire consumed seven centuries of Ireland’s recorded history in Dublin’s Four Courts building. 100 years later, the Virtual Records Treasury team within Trinity College completed a groundbreaking and painstaking digital restoration of those documents.

Solution

Ebow brought 50,000 pages of searchable, handwritten documents to life, creating a website that allows users to encounter the past in an entirely new way. In global terms, this platform gives the public access to the largest single release of transcribed documents in history:

• 50 million+ words of searchable text spanning 7 centuries
• 2.7 million+ knowledge graph triples
• 150,000+ database records
• 6,000+ maps

The design and development challenge was how to present the information and data to the public in a manner that was easy to search, easy to understand, access and engage with.