The National Irish Visual Arts Library is located at the National College of Art and Design (NCAD) in Dublin, and is jointly funded by NCAD and the Arts Council. Currently NIVAL is a partner of Humanities Serving Irish Society and part of the DHO consortium. NIVAL is open to researchers, the visual arts community and the wider public.

As part of the NIVAL Visual Research and Digital Archiving project a scoping exercise of all of the collections has been undertaken. The NIVAL holdings currently consist of:
• Individual artist files - approximately 3000
• Gallery/venue files - approximately 800
• Subject files (artists’ organisations, institutions, public art, art collections, community art etc. – approximately 800
• Design files (general craft and design, the evolution of craft and design in Ireland, craft and design organisations, individual craftspeople and designers, etc) – approximately 650
• Journals relating to culture and the arts in Ireland from 1900 to the present
• Publications, monographs etc. relating to Irish art and design
• 27 Special Collection

In addition to paper records NIVAL also holds material in diverse formats – slides and transparencies, photographs and negatives, audio-visual material, and original drawings and graphics.

Plans are underway for to create cross-searchable digital finding aids for the special collections using Encoded Archival Descriptions, EAD. The scoping will also identify particular collections for which digitisation is appropriate and, subject to funding, these projects will be initiated for completion by the end of 2011.

Information from a number of the special collection is available on the NIVAL website and details of the Earley and Company Archives and the Art College Student Registers are available elsewhere on DRAPIer. The NIVAL Artists’ Database is also listed separately.