As CollabArchive draws to an end, we organised three in-person hackathon events for our volunteers. It was great to see over 30 volunteers joining us over the past few weeks.
A hackathon is an event where people engage in rapid and collaborative work over a relatively short period of time. This was the first time that PRONI experimented with this type of volunteer work.
The first event was a Transcribathon where volunteers helped transcribe over 80 pages of Roberta Hewitt's earliest diary (1945-51).
The diary has been digitised and will be made accessible online via PRONI's e-catalogue alongside the transcript in the coming months. Meanwhile, you can click here to read Roberta's later diary and watch an animated film about her remarkable life.
The second event was a Catalogathon where the volunteers helped the Cataloguing Team at PRONI to enhance descriptions for Mary Alice Young's digitised photographic collection.
Mary Alice was an amateur photographer between 1890-1915; over 1100 of her negatives have survived. The images can be grouped under several themes reflecting her social standing, personal interests and clear ability as a photographer. They are also a unique moment captured in time, with many easily recognizable locations in the Ballymena area, the North Coast and others much further afield.
During the event, they learned from archivists Lorraine Bourke and Rebecca Gueddes about the cataloguing process and standards and helped write catalogue descriptions to make this collection more accessible to the public.
The last hackathon event focused on Digitisation and Indexing. The volunteers were taken behind the scenes at the Digitisation Studio to learn from digital archivist Joy Carey and her team about how documents are digitised, digitally enhanced and preserved by PRONI.
They also spent some time indexing eight scrapbooks from the NIGRA (Northern Irish Gay Rights Association) collection. These scrapbooks contain newspaper clippings and document a number of LGBT issues from the 1970s and 1980s.
The scrapbooks have been digitised and will soon be available alongside the index on the CollabArchive website and PRONI E-Catalogue.
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