With the opening of the new Irish Film Archive at Maynooth University CinÉireann caught up with its Head Kasandra O’Connell to talk us through what the new facility means and what way film archiving is going in the digital age.
So how did the new facility come about?
We had a relationship with Maynooth. We have been looking for a long time and there are a couple of ways that we could have gone. We could have done what some of our colleagues in the UK have done, which is just basically finding space and building a warehouse on it and then just use it as external storage, but we felt that because Ireland is so small and because there isn't a network of film archives, and because what we do is interesting to a lot of people, it made sense to work with a university if possible. When we started looking at this project with Maynooth it was about 10 years ago. We had not started digitising our collections the way they are now. We had an idea for the IFI player, but we didn't know when or if it would ever happen. Margaret Kelleher, who is currently the chair of our board, was director of An Foras Feasa Institute, which was the digital humanities programme in Maynooth, and I had worked with her on a couple of things. It seemed to both of us like it might be a good fit. Especially with the kind of university Maynooth was and the way that they were going and the kind of things that IFI archive wanted to do in the future. We are all about collaborations because you'll find it's just easier to convince people to fund projects if you've got good collaborations and good collaborators. That was the genesis of the project. I have been looking at space or at the issue of space since I started here. I think I started looking at it properly in 2001. We kind of had a few false starts with a couple of places that we could have partnered with, and finally Maynooth appeared. It's been a long time because we had to raise the funds. We had to convince the various partners including the Irish Film Board and the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland to support us financially. And we had the archiving funding campaign, the one that Saoirse Ronan did the video for. That was all towards this. So it has been a long road. And because it is an unusual partnership for us and for Maynooth, the legal side of it all of the documentation took a long time. They had to because this is a long-term partnership. We are not a tenant that is going to get kicked out after 20 years or whatever. It was a long process but they were very good. Their team did the design and actually project managed it for us, which was very useful because none of us would have had experience of doing that and they do. It also worked out quite well because we have an education and research partnership with them. One of the things that we did this year is with Maria Pramaggiore and Denis Condon in the Media Studies section. They are running a MA module for students in media archives and this is the first year of it. It is an elective module that different people doing the MA courses can take. It has been running since February and it runs up until May. They brought me into help design it so there is a digital archiving
Archiving Ireland's Film History
Words: Niall Murphy
26 CinÉireann / March 2018