Temporary changes with PRONI's reading room access, plus Northern Irish 1939 National Identity requests now being processed

I attended the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (www.nidirect.gov.uk/proni) stakeholder forum this morning; the following is a brief report.

The main PRONI reading room is being closed for a few weeks until mid-April, in order to facilitate some building works within it - the main reception room is being extended into the reading room, and a new staff consultation room is also being created in the space. This means that for the next few weeks the main search room on the same floor will host a reading room area, which will include twelve available desks, and one of the main scanners, onto which you can scan document productions and save images onto a USB drive (NB: this is only to be used for document productions, and not materials in the search room).

There have been some changes in the search room also, with the self-service microfilms moved to the middle of the room, and with some new library space to be added in the foreseeable future. 

The new on-site Axiell catalogue is now envisaged to be available from about April, after some minor problems with the software are resolved in the beta testing stage. This will replace the current Calm based catalogue system, through which document productions are ordered for the reading room.

Stormont is back up and running - which means that Northern Irish 1939 National Identity Register applications, as well as FOI requests, can now be fulfilled (NI bizarrely needs a sitting minister in place for FOI requests to be dealt with, with processing suspended whilst the parliament was adjourned). These should start going out shortly, with the current backlog envisaged to take a week or two to complete.  

Following the success of the PRONI centenary celebrations, the next year-long themed event will be on diversity and inclusivity, which will last from April 2024 to March 2025. As part of this the PRONI guide on slavery will be expanded and relaunched, which will include expanded content to cover areas such as the Caribbean. There will also be a conference at PRONI to tie in with Frederick Douglas Week in April (Douglas was a former slave in the US who became an anti-slavery campaigner in Belfast).

PRONI is currently discussion a community archives scheme with Newcastle and Glasgow Universities, with an event to be hosted in June in Belfast. It is hoped that grants may be available to make four or five community archive schemes sustainable.

Bernadette Walsh, archivist at Derry's Tower Museum (https://towermuseumcollections.com), confirmed that funding was now in place for a major move for the museum, which will close at some point in the near future and re-open in late 2026 at a new facility. The new digs in Derry will have a dedicated archive room called the Archive Discovery Zone, with about eight to ten spaces, to encourage those wishing to use the archives, including genealogists. The new museum will serve the wider district, not just Londonderry city.  

Roddy Hegarty of the Cardinal Tomás Ó Fiaich Memorial Library & Archive (www.ofiaich.ie) in Armagh noted that his facility will be celebrating its 25th anniversary from May this year to May 2025. It is hoped that a functioning catalogue for some recently deposited materials on correspondence involving the cardinal will be available for the centre by the end of this month.

Finally, for those who attended Stephen Scarth's recent presentation on the history of PRONI's early years, which had a few technical issues, this can now be seen on the PRONI Online YouTube channel at https://youtu.be/3wMcSPGk-FI?si=Y4NGPZ69loApljR7 - I have also embedded it below for convenience, it was an excellent talk!

 

(With thanks to all who attended)

Chris

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