The project will create an online database research tool that will provide enhanced user access to a large corpus of visual images from unknown or lesser-known Irish illustrated periodicals published in the nineteenth century. The source material for this project was chosen from selected collections housed in the Russell Library, Maynooth. The project will provide enhanced accessibility to a wide variety of Irish images; encourage better understanding of the original work through enhancement and contextualization information; provide innovative search and retrieval technology for superior user interface; create an interdisciplinary resource tool for teaching and learning; assist in the conservation of the archival source originals. For each periodical chosen for digitization, a supplementary article will provide additional contextualization material about the nature and history of each periodical.
This new digital archive of visual images will provide researchers with an interactive human-usable source and resource.

To enhance access to the images, Irish INC utilizes VRA Core 4.0 metadata XML schemas, which uses structured vocabularies to describe, catalogue and index the source images. VRA is the data standard used by the cultural heritage community developed by the Visual Resources Association's Data Standards Committee and it has been chosen due to its applicability for cultural objects and its interoperability with Dublin Core, METS and other encoding standards. Our software engineering methodology ensures that Irish INC is supported by generic VRE software and is harvestable by DHO repositories.