The Seamus Heaney Centre Digital Archive (SHCDA) houses recordings of contemporary public poetry readings staged in Ireland, and readings outside of Ireland that involve Irish writers. The guiding principle in creating the SHCDA has been to provide a user-friendly, searchable database of its materials. Currently, there are over 2000+ tracks stored within the archive.

In addition to the performance of creative compositions (including prose and music as they occur at readings), the SHCDA also conserves the related speech-acts associated with the readings: introductions, question-and-answer sessions, talks, and interviews. Metadata compiled on all of these recording enables sophisticated searches within the archive.

As well as user-initiated searches, the archive can be browsed by predetermined categories that include genre (‘poems’, ‘prose’, 'music', ‘introductions’, etc.), 'performer', 'author', 'venue', 'event', 'language' (English, Irish, Welsh, etc.), 'translator', and 'publisher'. The designation 'UTR' (Uncollected at Time of Recording) should assist those looking for pre-published versions of particular poems. Further, Track File pages, generated for all recordings, provide: contextualizing information on the event (location, audience size, start time, etc.); a link to all the other readings/performances at that event; annotations on the reading; and jpeg and pdf files on performers, event memorabilia, venues and printed programmes. Transcriptions of recorded works are not provided but print-sources of creative compositions are indicated on the Track File page, where applicable.

Established under the auspices of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast, the SHCDA is designed and maintained by the University's Special Collections Department and by their Research Support team. It is hoped the SHCDA can assist in generating original research on particular performers, writers and works, as well as providing valuable materials for the fields of Performance Studies, Linguists, and Celtic Studies.

(Please note that recordings in SHCDA are best appreciated using headphones but many recordings are also suitable for classroom teaching.)