THE NATIONAL Library of Ireland is today celebrating the cataloguing of a project linking photographs from its famous Lawrence collection to photographs taken by a team of volunteers a century later.
The project charts changes in landscape and built environment between the era of the Lawrence collection (1865- 1914) and the more recent photographs, taken in 1990-1991.
In 1989, when everyone was still using film cameras and before the days of email and text, two local history groups, the Federation of Local History Societies and the Federation for Ulster Local Studies, got together to design the scheme, which would involve such groups in every county of Ireland.
The plan was to select representative pictures of every county, and possibly every town, from the many thousands in the Lawrence photographic collection, and have somebody locally retake the pictures from the same viewpoint at what would then have been about 100 years after the originals were taken.
The project, which was sponsored by Fuji, involved members of local history societies north and south.
Their finished work was archived at the National Library, but until now had not been digitally catalogued or made available to the public.
The cataloguing took from January 2012 until last week to complete and was carried out by a team of volunteers from the two federations.
See the library's Flickr page at iti.ms/JEQRCV. As well as viewing images on the website, the public can visit the actual locations and upload their own 2012 versions of the scenes