From Partition to Direct Rule: 50 Years of Northern Ireland Parliamentary Debates Online (Stormont Papers)

Project start date: 2003-10

Project end date: 2006-11

Casting a unique and valuable light on the development of Northern Ireland, the Papers consist of the Parliamentary Papers of the devolved government of Northern Ireland from June 7 1921 to the dissolution of Parliament in March 28 1972. They make up 84 printed volumes - around 93,000 pages and 74 million words. Based on the model of British Hansard, the papers record the utterances of MPs sitting at the Stormont Parliament within the first period of Home Rule. Up to now, the few surviving sets of complete volumes could only be consulted within their relevant library. They have no comprehensive subject index and so have been inaccessible and difficult to use. Visitors to the site can now search the Papers by using specific keywords or they can browse particular debates according to the combined subject index, or they can simply view the volumes. The task of digitising and delivering the Papers was divided between the Arts and Humanities Data Service Executive at King's College London and the Centre for Data Digitisation and Analysis based at Queen's University Belfast; the former largely focussed on indexing, marking-up and delivering the resource, while the latter did the data capture work. Loose xml files converted to html; tiffs converted to png