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Published August 19, 2020 | Version v1
Dataset Open

'Documents Laid' Metadata 1922-2019

  • 1. School of Computer Science, University College Dublin, Ireland
  • 2. Oireachtas Library & Research Service, Dublin, Ireland

Description

As part of the centenary celebrations of the first Dáil (Irish parliament) in 2019 the Oireachtas Library embarked on a project to prepare and publish an open dataset of metadata from its Documents Laid collection.

‘Documents Laid’ is the collective term for documents that are formally submitted to the Irish parliament to support the democratic process. They are most often laid pursuant to a statutory obligation or standing order of the Houses. Document types might include: regulations and orders; financial statements and annual reports from Departments, Committees and public bodies; post enactment reports for primary legislation, etc.

Responsibility for the management of all procedures relating to the laying of documents is assigned to the Oireachtas Library. The Library adds metadata (titles, department names, subjects, etc.) as catalogue records for each document.

The collection provides a unique overview of the work of successive governments, parliaments and public bodies throughout the life of the Irish state. Documents Laid are an essential element of parliamentary scrutiny, being referenced or evaluated through debate, parliamentary questions or Committee meetings.

The catalogue records for all documents laid between 1922 and 2019 were exported from the Library’s catalogue. The dataset was cleaned in OpenRefine by a librarian. Additional cleaning and standardisation was carried out by a data analyst from the School of Computer Science in University College Dublin. The cleaned dataset contains 86,449 records, described by 26 fields. It is stored in CSV and JSON format.

It is intended that this open dataset will be of interest to scholars of modern Irish history and the Irish parliament, particularly in the area of parliamentary oversight and scrutiny.

Files

Docslaid_Merged_20200429.csv

Files (121.6 MB)

Name Size Download all
md5:8c2076900859f2205a6b4afc06bc44c0
39.0 MB Preview Download
md5:da8595d681731929e940bad6ccc8683f
82.6 MB Preview Download

Additional details

Related works

Is source of
Report: 10.5281/zenodo.3991556 (DOI)
Other: 10.5281/zenodo.4090875 (DOI)