Major news this week from Ireland, in that the National Archives in Dublin has taken down its genealogy records platform for the foreseeable future. This is the message as displayed on the main NAI website at https://nationalarchives.ie:
The National Archives’ microsites are offline due to maintenance on the server. We will provide information in the coming days on how to access these collections, including material available in the Reading Room.
Explaining the move in further detail at https://nationalarchives.ie/collections/genealogy-website/, the archive notes
The National Archives’ microsites are currently offline due to essential maintenance and redevelopment. They will remain unavailable for some time while we rebuild and update these resources on a new platform.
All records from the microsites are safely backed up. Over the coming days, we will provide information on how to access these collections, including material that can be viewed in the Reading Room.
Dublin based genealogist Claire Bradley has pointed out where to access alternative copies of most of the datasets on her blog at https://cbgenealogy.ie/nai-collections-offline/, although some collections are not as functional as on the NAI site, for example, the wills calendars on FindmyPast and MyHeritage only have brief indexed descriptions, as they were linked to the original records on the NAI platform (and bizarrely, MyHeritage notes the names of 'beneficiaries' on its platform, rather than 'executors'.)
I have been made aware of a story in Ireland concerning a person who has scraped census records to go beyond the NAI daily access limit for an article about 'religious encoding of names', which you can read at https://believethedata.org/the-secret-code-of-irish-names/. I have no idea if this exercise is a contributory factor to the NAI deciding to pull its site down, but the timing is quite a coincidence.
All of this coincidentally happened a week before my next Pharos course, Progressing Your Irish Research Online, which starts next Monday 27 July. As a consequence, I spent most of Wednesday rewriting substantial parts of the course to cater for the new research environment now online, as I focussed on many of the collections previously available on the NAI records platform. If interested to sign up, please visit https://www.pharostutors.com/progressing-your-irish-research-online - the course lasts 5 weeks, and costs £70.
(With thanks to Claire Bradley and Myko Clelland)
Chris
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Without it being evident what harm was done by the data scraping, surely it was a valuable exercise given the quality of the material produced, and certainly was not reckless.
ReplyDeleteYes, the word 'reckless' was perhaps a bit harsh, I have removed it.
DeleteI'm the author of the article you mentioned. I retrieved the records from the census API (not the genealogy microsites) at the end of June, respecting the API limits and introducing delays between my requests to minimise the load on the servers. The services I used are all still available, so it seems very unlikely to me that my accessing the census APIs caused a different service (the microsites) to be taken offline. But thank you for referring lots of traffic to my article! I hope your readers find it interesting.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the clarification Jack.
DeleteThanks, Chris. I agree the timing is suspicious.
ReplyDelete