Knock Shrine Museum

Knock Museum at Knock Shrine explores the history and heritage of this International Marian and Eucharistic Shrine, nestled away in the West of Ireland, from the Apparition of 1879 right up to the key developments of recent years. One of their collections is the Knock Shrine Annuals, which were published by the Knock Shrine Society from 1938 until 2015. These journals document yearly events including ceremony programmes, favours attributed to Our Lady of Knock, information for pilgrims and organisers, prayers, articles, and photographs. The Museum wanted to make the annuals accessible in their museum exhibit and online for pilgrims and historians alike. Eneclann worked with the Knock Museum to outline a digitisation project that was approved for funding by the Heritage Council.

Knock Museum contracted Eneclann to digitise their archival collection of 77 Knock Shrine annuals, dating from 1938 to 2015. We digitised the annuals with our overhead digital camera to capture the best image of the material and minimise damage to this unique collection. 10,900 images were captured, and outputs were master TIFFs (400 dpi), surrogate JPGs, and surrogate PDFs with custom watermarks. Eneclann advised the Knock Museum team on how to best display the digitised annuals on the Museum’s existing website. The master TIFFs were converted into specially-formatted PDFs that were integrated with the viewing software on the website. 

Available online, the annuals are now accessible to anyone interested in their devotional and historical content. The project was supported by the Heritage Council in the Community Heritage Grant Scheme 2023.

More info can be found here: www.knockshrine.ie/knock-shrine-annuals