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National Library of Ireland. The 1916 Rising: Personalities and Perspectives « Back

Irish Design Effectiveness Awards 2006
Gold Award for Most Effective Web Design
Finalist for a Golden Spider Award in 2006
Finalist for a Digital Media Award in 2006

testimonial 

'The launch of the exhibition has been very effective in that it allowed us to highlight the potential of the Library's collections and to bring it directly into the learning environment in a way never before possible.'
Ciara McDonnell, Exhibition Coordinator

www.nli.ie/1916/

Background

The National Library of Ireland's mission is to collect, preserve and make available books, manuscripts and illustrative material of Irish interest. It has an on-going programme of exhibitions within the building through-out the year.

The Challenge

2006 was the 90th anniversary of the Easter Rising. The Library wanted to commemorate this event but had limited funds and its only available space was taken up with another exhibition.

Our Approach

As a traditional exhibition was thus out of the question, we decided there was one space which was not taken up. We set about creating a traditional exhibition - documents, images, guidebooks & tours - online.

We created an interactive online exhibition of 1916 materials - the first such exhibition ever to be staged by the Library. The raw material consists of 55,000 words of text and 500 images, depicting the human stories of those involved in the events of Easter 1916.

The site is built entirely in macromedia flash and features image galleries, with resource PDF documents - all replicating a traditional exhibition which is accessible to anyone with an internet connection. Opening hours no longer applied for this exhibition!

This online exhibition was delivered in just three weeks by the Dara Creative team.

THE RESULTS

The website was officially launched during Easter Week and achieved significant press coverage for the Library.

From April - September 2006, the website received 127.5% more visitors than anticipated.

Going on-line with this exhibition has opened the Library's virtual doors to a huge number of interested users who would never have had the opportunity to visit a ‘live' version of the same material.

This website won significant awards including Irish Design Effectiveness Awards (IDEA) 2006, Gold Award for Most Effective Web Design and was a nominee for Golden Spider & Digital Media Award.

Dara Creative continues to work with the NLI producing a range of printed material most notably the National Library of Ireland News.

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