Bureau of Military History Contemporary Documents – Military Archives

The Military Archives is undertaking significant digitisation initiatives for many of their collections to make them more publicly accessible. As a part of the Decade of Centenaries, portions of the Bureau of Military History Contemporary Documents (BMH CD) collection were identified for digitisation in several phases. The materials in the remaining phase could not be digitised with a flatbed scanner because of their size, delicate condition, and unique formats. Digitising these items required specialised knowledge and equipment, as well as the ability to work onsite at the Military Archives building in Cathal Brugha Barracks. 

Eneclann digitised this large portion of the Military Archives’ BMH CD collection over the course of a year on location at the Archives. Material selected by archivists for digitisation included pamphlets, large maps, books, photographs, letters, newspapers, notebooks, and posters. Over 65,000 images were captured with the overhead digital camera setup in our mobile digitisation booth. Several oversized items (maps and posters) were also captured with a special setup outside the booth. Material was digitised as master TIFFs (400/600 dpi) and converted to surrogate PDFs. Files were named according to the archival catalogue and the necessary metadata was captured as well. 

Much of this collection will be made available on the Military Archives website.

More information can be found at: www.bmh.militaryarchives.ie