Thursday, July 19, 2012

The Concept. The Idea. The Service.


For those of us schooled in the Irish National School system the ever present Roll Book is a constant reminder of who we went to school with, when we went to school and who were our teachers.  The information within these books is like finding a gold seam seam to a prospector working in the genealogy or family history area.  It can yield connections to the people of the past, to the schooldays and memories of the researcher’s childhood and point them in the right direction to make more discoveries.  But in many cases, more often than not really, the schools themselves are unwilling or unable to provide the information due to Data Protection issues.  Now the Data Protection Act is a fine instrument on the whole and it needs to be in place to prevent data theft and unauthorized use of information.  But it could be put to such good use by people simply looking to do some research on their ancestors…

According to my sources any Roll Book in an Irish school that is over 100 years old at the time of enquiry is free to browse and garner information from; though some schools would still seem to be unaware of this and are still refusing requests from genuine genealogists and researchers.  There are a number of reasons for this.  The schools are afraid of what a researcher might see, they are worried that someone will remove a page from the book (it has happened in some cases), and the final reason would seem to be that they, the Boards of Management of the schools, simply feel that as ‘guardians’ of the information they must at all costs keep it under lock and key.  Shame.

Here at Irish Roll Books we have the solution; photograph the historical ones,  ie 100 years old or more.  The data is protected, the images from each roll book are easily viewable on any monitor, the information can be extracted from the pages that are photographed and used as datasets for historians going forward, the schools could possibly even make a few euros here and there from sales of images of the pages that are photographed.  All sound good?

Irish Roll Books can carry out this service for a reasonable cost to your school.  Get in touch now at 086-3957962.

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