BRINGING CORONER'S RECORDS TO LIFEa collaboration between the Glucksman Library and faculty to teach digital humanities to fourth-year students at UL

The Glucksman Library runs a series of programmes to support research, teaching and learning at the University of Limerick (UL). The Special Collections and Archives department within the library utilises its unique and distinctive collections to enhance student experience, encouraging ‘hands-on’ learning for students of all types. As a pilot project in the Autumn Semester of 2018, archivist Dr Kirsten Mulrennan and librarian Sinéad Keogh were invited to co-teach a portion of a fourth-year medical history module run by Dr Ciara Breathnach, Senior Lecturer in the Department of History, as part of her Irish Research Council funded project, 'Death and Burial Data in Ireland, 1864-1922'. This module was designed to do a number of things at once: educate the students about the importance of archival material; encourage critical thinking about the use of medical records for historical research; demonstrate the potential of digital humanities tools for the exploitation of linked data; and introduce the students to the basic concepts of metadata, text mark-up and the Text-Encoding Initiative (TEI). Working in groups with digitised historic records from the Irish Coroner’s Court held in the National Archives of Ireland, the students produced verbatim archival transcriptions of five records, highlighting linked data elements they felt would be most beneficial for future research – elements such as names, places, organisations, dates, and causes of death. The output from the module demonstrated a high level of student engagement with the process, and feedback from both the faculty and students at the end of the module was incredibly favourable. As a result, this module design will be further developed for the coming academic year. Mulrennan and Keogh have used this experience to build their teaching profile within the university, as well as establish lasting links with the history department. Overall, this project illustrates the diverse ways in which academic libraries can work with faculty as partners in digital humanities to grow graduate information literacies and skills, creatively use technological tools to get both staff and students engaged with historic sources, and ultimately, that the increasing integration of rare books and archival material into the curriculum allows for the continued development of unique academic programmes at UL.