Sharon Healy
PhD Candidate in Digital Humanities, National University of Ireland, Maynooth

From the Negative to the Web: An exploration of the challenges, and potential solutions to provide online access to the Air Corps Aerial Photographs collection

The Irish Air Corps Aerial Photographs are a unique historical collection, being the only state aerial photography record of Ireland from the 1930s-1980s. Within the collection are analogue aerial photographs, vertical negative films, and coastal survey negative films. Further to this, are a collection of flight lines (or logs), which are records of a flight for a photo mission, and a collection of plotting maps. While some of the plotting maps (1950s-1980s) and flight lines (1960s-1980s) provide sufficient background detail to cross-reference dates and locations of a photo mission to enable the indexing of a set of photographs in a digital resource, it is sometimes the case that this information is erroneous or limited. Moreover, background information for photo missions prior to the 1950s is often non-existent. This paper explores the challenges, and potential solutions to provide online access to the Air Corps Aerial Photographs collection.

​Sharon Healy is a PhD Candidate and Irish Research Council scholar in Digital Humanities at Maynooth University. Prior to commencing her doctoral studies in 2017, Sharon worked on several DH projects including Letters 1916-23 (Maynooth University), the Air Corps Aerial Photographs collection (Military Archives) and a project on How the Internet came to Ireland (TechArchives).