 Ddod, ddangos! Felly dyma'r bobl sy'n ddweud, eich bod yma'r rhaid i ni wedi gweld arall, yma'r llwyddoedd yma, ac mae gennym nhw'n rhaid i chi i chi'n gwybod o'r ffordd â'r rhain ymlaenau a'r ddweud cymaint sy'n cymaintio'r 1916 ymlaenau. Mae'r ddweud, mae'r wych yn ymdill yn ymddill o'r ddafod o'r centinoi. Y ddafod ar yr awdyn sydd cymaintio'r 100th anforsau ymdill chi'n ysgrifennu o'r awdyn between 1912 and 1923 which brought about momentous change in Ireland, marking the end of British colonialism and the birth of the Republic of Ireland. It was a traumatic birth which rose out of a very divisive events. The centenary spanned those listed on the slide here and include the First World War, the 1916 Easter Rising and culminate with the War of Independence and the Civil War. Now this is a hugely important thing for Ireland. There is no precedent for this decade long period of commemoration and historical collections are absolutely central to these commemorations. Archives have never been more prominent in the public consciousness and for a while there you couldn't open a newspaper or turn on the TV without seeing a historical document or an archivist there to interpret it. In my book that is all a very good thing. The decade provides an unprecedented opportunity for the country as a whole to engage with its own history. However, commemoration does mean different things to different people. And many of the events that happened a hundred years ago have an enduring legacy in modern Irish politics today, both north of the border in Northern Ireland and south of the border in the Republic of Ireland. And indeed in Ireland's relationship with Britain and we can see this in the news at the moment with Brexit and the border negotiations. And I think that a sensitive understanding of the nuances of history should be compulsory when it comes to political diplomacy. So how these events are commemorated still has the power to cause division and conflict within communities. Rather than a shared history, the decade of centenaries could be viewed as a sequence of events, each one with different stakeholders and different political undertones. Now the sensitivities of commemoration have been at the forefront of the considerations of the main organizing bodies both north and south. Now the text on the left here illustrates the initial statement of the Irish government's advisory group on centenary commemorations which acted as a sort of mission statement for all the events from 2012 to 2016. This recognises the emotions involved in any act of commemoration as well as a phrase that Geoffrey Crossock made mention of earlier today, the multiple readings and multiple identities which form part of the Irish historical experience. The slide on the right is taken from the decade of anniversary's toolkit produced by the Northern Ireland Community Relations Council as a guide to those planning commemorative events in the north. They developed four principles for commemoration which included recognition of the implications and consequences of what happened and an understanding that different perceptions and interpretations exist. Now the commemorations of the centenaries on that list that I showed you so far have offered the opportunity to re-examine the past and also to shed light on aspects of a shared national story which may have been omitted or perhaps forgotten. This has been demonstrated through the traditional view of the First World War, formerly considered to be more or less solely that of an Anglo-Irish tradition. Through the centenary commemorations of the war there has been a rediscovery of different stories and nuances and there is a sense that history has been reassessed and reclaimed by all sorts of different communities around Ireland. Once again the act of going back to the archives, back to the primary sources is absolutely central in this. So the 1916 Easter Rising has occupied a central place in the decade of commemoration so far because of its positioning as a crucial turning point for modern Irish politics. The Rising was an armed insurrection against British rule in Ireland which lasted for six days in April 1916 culminating in the execution of 15 of the leaders in May 1916 by British forces. This started a shift in public opinion and more importantly international opinion which paved the way for Irish independence. Commemoration of this particular event can very much be fused contemporary politics and this was evident during the commemorations of the 50th anniversary in 1966 which proved to be a very somber militaristic uncritical experience which went on to have very divisive after effects. This is something that community leaders had been very mindful of in the run up to last year's centenary and as a country there was a desire to avoid any comparison with the 1966 commemorations. Needless to say the different sectors involved in commemorative activities approached the centenary with some trepidation but the commemorations of 2016 proved to be a far more creative, inclusive and pluralistic experience. There has been a bewildering range of responses to the centenary from heritage agencies and all across the arts basically you name the medium, 1916 has been commemorated through it. The level of engagement from the general public was absolutely unprecedented and could be seen physically in the numbers turning out for events and lectures and virtually through the proliferation of community and family websites and just general online discussion. There was a particular focus on the Easter weekend with state-led formal tributes to those who died accompanied by what can only be called a city-wide street festival which was part carnival, part history symposium, part family day out and that was organised by the National Broadcaster RTE. The estimate is that one million people took part in that weekend in commemorative activities and to put that into perspective the population of the whole of Ireland at this point is estimated to be about four and a half million people. So what did the library of Trinity College Dublin contribute? Well, we recognised that we are perhaps most famous for the Book of Kells and our collection of medieval manuscripts and we wouldn't be known even inside Ireland as a repository for 1916 archival material. This is perhaps due to the role of Trinity College itself during the rising as an outpost of British Empire where troops were garrisoned and these are British troops in the middle of Front Square and Trinity College during 1916. The centenary provided us with an opportunity to reexamine some of the complexities and to banish some preconceptions. So strategically what we wanted to do was to alert researchers to the potential of the collections to increase their visibility online to act as a catalyst for research on 1916. We also wanted to contribute to the fleshing out of those multiple identities mentioned earlier and also to tell the stories of previously unknown protagonists from different political viewpoints. We also wanted to interact more with our audience and connect with 1916 researchers through social media. So we did this through a number of different initiatives, most notably the Changed Utterly blog project and Twitter account. We also had a physical exhibition in the library's beautiful long room and an online exhibition that we developed and used Google Cultural Institute. So this was the Changed Utterly blog project. It was run by our departments, the research collection departments within the library and it was the library's flagship response to the centenary. It was a year-long blog project with its own website and Twitter account with posts on a weekly basis and its name changed utterly after the most famous line in the Yates poem, Easter 1916. In designing the project, we took our cue from the 1916 collections themselves, which are lots of small, disparate ones that would lend themselves very easily to an episodic project like a blog. And one of the most important aspects for us was that we started a year ahead of the anniversary in April 2015 to use that time to draw attention to the library's resources to act as a springboard for other people's research rather than to simply tell a linear story. The posts were written by library staff, academics and other experts. Lots of our academic bloggers were tapped on the shoulder whilst they were working in the library reading rooms and they perhaps had books coming out that we could promote on Twitter. So it worked as a real reciprocal relationship. Each post links to the library's catalogue entries and to the digital collection site where applicable, bringing viewers through to other library resources. The content is made up of diaries, letters, pamphlets, photographs and objects from all sides of the political divide. And in exploring this material you can see the stories of ordinary people as they struggle to comprehend what is happening to them. And in others you get a sense of the real complicated social and political situation in Ireland at this moment. And this is illustrated quite incredibly by the library's own copy of the Proclamation which is Ireland's Declaration of Independence. It was taken from the walls of the GPO, the rebel headquarters during the rising. And during conservation 11 First World War recruiting posters were found to be attached to the back of it. And this articulates the two opposing political viewpoints coexisting at this time. One group recruiting for the British Empire, the other rejecting empire and proclaiming a republic. Now one of the strengths of the library are the accounts written by women caught up in the rising. And some of these have only been highlighted for the very first time through the Change Duttley project. And there were many other diverse posts from Trinity's role in the rising to that of other institutions such as Dublin Zoo. And that post proved actually quite popular with primary schools as a way into the material for their students. As well as posts on poetry, armoured vehicles, rugby and stained glass. The content is incredibly rich and varied and I think this is why people really engage with it. It was telling lots of unexpected stories. It kind of didn't know what was going to come up week after week. Sometimes we didn't know what was going to come up week after week. So that leads us on to our attempts to measure the impact. Now we've tried to take a look at the immediate impact felt during the project. So from April 2015 to April 2016. And we also have noticed since the project sort of finished, so to speak, a change in the sorts of engagement that we've received in the 18 months since we finished blogging and tweeting. And I'll also briefly mention our approach into the project for the future. And I have to say that I wish we'd built in a few plans on how to do this when we started. We kind of didn't. Firstly, some quantitative statistics in terms of views of the blog and Twitter followers indicate that we finished the year of blog posts with 65,000 views of the blog. And the subsequent year saw 10,000 further visits with the spike on the anniversary. These are of course just the number of clicks and they don't convey any opinion on the quality of what we produced or how it helped other people. Twitter enabled us to tap into research communities and spark discussion about our blog content and provided another access point into the material. Our followers were mainly academic, local history and official 1916 sites. But we also had a great deal of engagement with teachers and with general researchers at large. It's also been very useful for calls for information. Our followers identified the location of a photograph of an armored car, for example. And we also found out how many armored car enthusiasts there are out there. By April 2016 we had 2,200 followers on Twitter with a further 300 arriving the following year even after the blogging had finished. So when trying to organise, sorry this is a bit wordy, when trying to organise the qualitative result for the impact felt by the end of the project, I've tried to separate it out into visibility, student engagement, academic engagement and external engagement. And I'll just pick out a few prominent examples. Firstly we started to notice a huge increase in image orders for items featured in the blog. Many of these were used in other institutions exhibitions such as the flagship exhibition at the general post office or popped up on hoardings around town like this one that I just took on my phone that popped up outside Ulster Bank on O'Connell Street. Another unexpected outcome has been the increase in levels of donations of new archival material, like this autograph album which came from the Frongurch internment camp in Wales where many of the revels were taken afterwards. And the blog post on this was actually written by the relative of this internee here. As well as an upsurge in researchers of 1916 material in the reading rooms, we also assisted student groups with project work like the digital humanities students who were working on a visualisation of one of the eyewitness diaries. And we also worked with the student philosophical society on their centenary week exhibition. We collaborated a great deal, one of the great things about this project is we made other connections within the institution and we collaborated a great deal with the public affairs and communications department and built relationships there. So I don't know why we were taken by surprise by the media attention but we certainly were. We featured in the Irish Times and on the RT news and there was also an exclusive on our copy of the proclamation in the Guardian. We also formed a collaboration with the Irish examiner newspaper who turned six of our blog posts into articles in their newspaper. We were also finalised for a blog awards Ireland and also an e-government award for promoting Ireland overseas and we were described as one of the more innovative responses to the rising on RT's history show. So thinking about impact after the project, when scoping out the project initially we spoke to Trinity's history department and they advised us based on their own experience of the commemorations of the 1798 rebellion in 1998. They said that there's a huge surge of interest from scholars for the anniversary period and then it's generally left alone as a subject for study for the next ten years. So we were expecting the same and in fact what we've noticed is whilst students engaged in pure historical research that has kind of tailed off. We have found ourselves speaking to students working on more reflective and analytical research on the nature of commemoration and how institutions have gone about this. I've been in contact with such students from Ireland but also beyond St Andrews, Glasgow, Paris and most recently earlier this month someone in Detroit. We are also aware of the publication of works drawing on our collections that's starting to come through and we're also one of the joys. We're really delighted to be involved in the piece of onsite theatre called Meeting Ghosts in College Park which drew a number of its characters from personalities that had been featured in Change Duttley blog posts. Another huge benefit actually is that our work has been noticed by college authorities and the research community. We've been asked to speak about Change Duttley at conferences and also to contribute to reports and booklets. We appeared prominently in our Provost's annual review last year and I was asked to contribute an article on the project for the Dean of Research's report for this year and that to my knowledge is the first time that the library has been profiled as a producer of research. The success of the project has also given us great confidence in producing other digital projects and great leverage when encouraging others to collaborate with us. This was the case on this summer's Jonathan Swift online exhibition which was led by us but in partnership with other Dublin cultural institutions. We've also been approached by academic schools wanting to model student capstone projects on the Change Duttley blog and that's been enormously gratifying as well. Sustainability is always a problem with a digital project and so we wanted to see if we could set Change Duttley up as a portal for the 1916 collections that could be used into the future. This Easter we gave it a revamp. It still has the 52 blog posts but it's now enhanced with audio-visual material either produced by ourselves but mostly from Trinity academic colleagues. So it now contains podcasts to the Humanities Research Centre, the Trinity Longroom Hub, held a symposium on the proclamation. It holds those podcasts and also it has a YouTube lecture course produced by history lecturer Patrick Gagan on the background to the rising. So it's a really rich research resource now and it's supported by Trinity's research IT department to help to try and assure its technical survival into the future. It's also been captured by the web archiving projects that were run by the British Library and the Bodleian and also the National Library of Ireland earlier, well late last year. Now heading into the commemorations at the beginning of last year the whole country worried that it might be divisive and nationalistic but in fact it enabled communities to come together and was enormously enriching. So much so that the government have recognised the societal and political importance of heritage and culture in fostering this feeling of togetherness and exploration of the past for the future. This reached a very welcome crescendo at the end of 2016 with the announcement of a state sponsored framework to build on the legacy of the 1916 commemorations called Creative Ireland. This programme aims to continue the sense of community pride and appreciation for culture which emerged during the centenary. There is of course concern amongst arts and heritage agencies that government rhetoric is backed up with appropriate investment and this wasn't completely fulfilled in the budget announcement of 2018 but it is a five year programme so we watch with eagerness. So now we look to the future and the more potentially contentious commemorations such as that of the Irish Civil War. The advisory group statement for commemorations from 2018 to 2023 was released last month recognising we should also be conscious that on this island we have a common history but not a common memory of these shaping events. And that the aim of commemorations should be to broaden sympathies without having to abandon loyalties and in particular to recognise the value of ideals and sacrifices including their cost. As for cultural institutions I foresee more collaboration as we all got to know one another and built a great sense of camaraderie throughout the 1916 commemorations and whatever we do we will take our cue from the material itself and let the archives speak for themselves. And I'd just like to take this opportunity to thank my co-lead Shane Moore and all our fabulous colleagues and contributors and thank you all for listening.