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Kilmainham Gaol is planning a new website to show a collection of autograph books owned by prisoners at the time of the Easter Rising, in time for next year's centenary events.
The Office of Public Works, which is responsible for the management of the national monument in Dublin, is seeking tenders to digitise a selection of the books from the 1916 to 1918 period.
The books containing sketches and signatures of prisoners are considered an important collection in the context of the ongoing “decade of centenaries”, the OPW said in tender information published this week.
Access to them is currently restricted, however, due both to their condition and to the facilities available at the gaol.
“As part of the centenary celebration of the 1916 Rising it has been decided to digitise the autograph books and associated photographs and make these available to the public online,” the OPW said.
It hopes to have the autograph book collection digitised in a “flippable” online format during the second half of this year and available to the public online from 2016.
The website must be designed so that it can be viewed on desktop, tablets and smartphones.
The graphics must also allow for individual pages to be enlarged and explored in greater detail. There are some 14 books and 2,500 pages covering the 1916 to 1918 period.
Biographical details
About 250 pages will contain additional information about the books’ signatories, including photographs and biographical details.
Eventually, the website will be expanded to include an additional 8,000 pages of autograph books and further information about the gaol archives, the OPW said.
Kilmainham Gaol is said by the national monuments management body to be one of the largest unoccupied gaols in Europe.
It opened in 1796 as the county gaol for Dublin and held most of the key figures involved in the struggle for Irish independence.
Leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party Charles Stewart Parnell was imprisoned there from October 1881 to May 1882, along with many of his fellow MPs, after their rejection of the Land Act introduced by the British government in 1881.