From Partition to Direct Rule: 50 years of Northern Ireland Parliamentary Papers online (Stormont Papers Project)

This resource is now online and can be accessed from the project website

(22nd November 2006)

Brief Description

In 1921 Ireland was partitioned and, as a result, a Northern Ireland Parliament was formed. It was dissolved amidst civil strife in 1972 when Westminster took direct control of the governance of Ulster. Throughout its 50 year existence the Parliament produced Parliamentary Papers following the Westminster model. These papers cast a unique and valuable light on the development of the Province. However, the 92,000 pages of Parliamentary Papers are held by few institutions and they have no comprehensive subject index. Hence they are inaccessible and difficult to use. As part of this project the Centre for Digitisation and Data Analysis (at Queen's University Belfast), with the support of academics, archivists and politicians, takes the Papers and fully computerises them making an online resource available hosted by AHDS.

Aims and Outputs

This project will take the printed Hansard Parliamentary Papers created by the Northern Ireland Government for the whole period of its existence from 1921 to 1972 and make them available in machine-readable form over the Internet. Specifically we will:

Obtain the most suitable version of the Parliamentary Papers from the normally reference-only two volume set held by the Queen's University of Belfast Library.
Image-scan each page of Parliamentary Papers as a bi-tonal TIF at 600 dots per inch, preserving the image as an archival copy.
Run the TIF files through advanced fully-user trained Optical Character Recognition Systems (OCR).
Fully correct the OCR'd text.
Preserve the TIF files and associated machine-readable text through the deposit of the objectswith Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS). Develop, with AHDS, a web-based virtual library of the Papers.
Increase accessibility to the resource by providing a user guide and introduction to key legislation, a full subject index, and a key person index.

Project Details and Contacts

Project Title		From Partition to Direct Rule: 50 years of Northern Ireland Parliamentary Papers online
Start Date		1/10/2003
End Date		30/09/2006
Project Director		Paul Ell (Centre for Data Digitisation and Analysis, Queen's University Belfast)>
AHDS Staff on Project		Alastair Dunning, Malcolm Polfreman, Sheila Anderson - contact via firstname.secondname@ahds.ac.uk

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