Posted on: 28 November 2006
A new TCD research project, Irish Film & TV Research Online, a website designed to bring together the wide diversity of research material relating to Irish-made cinema and television as well as Irish-themed audio-visual representations produced outside of Ireland, was launched this week. The TCD research project was led by Professor Kevin Rockett, Head of the School of Drama, Film and Music at Trinity College Dublin who has been working with researcher, Eugene Finn, since 2003, documenting almost 40,000 Irish-themed films and television productions.
The website incorporates three searchable databases, Irish Film & Television Index; Irish Film & Television Biographies; and Irish Film & Television Bibliography; and the Irish Postgraduate Film Research Seminar, an annual conference of film studies’ postgraduate students based in Ireland or engaged in researching Irish material elsewhere.
The impetus for the Irish Film & Television Index was Professor Rockett’s The Irish Filmography: Fiction Films 1896 – 1996 (1996), which documented all fiction films made in Ireland and about Ireland and the Irish, produced worldwide since the beginnings of cinema. Working with Irish and international film archives, Professor Rockett and his researcher have updated the Irish Filmography to the present, and added to the website thousands of non-fiction films, including cinema newsreels and animation, made about the Irish.
The website will prove to be a major resource for researchers, whether academic, from within the film industry, or the general public, in its easy packaging of information concerning Irish-made or Irish-themed audio-visual material. In many cases, such information may have been gathered from numerous sources both within Ireland and elsewhere. Using the searchable fields, a researcher can almost instantly find a particular film, its cast list or production personnel, read a synopsis of its content, establish where a copy of it might be held, what has been written about it, identify a list of complementary titles through a keyword search, or, using the biographical database, access further information on cast and crew.
A booklet on the project and a series of short articles on Irish film and television history by Professor Rockett have also been published to coincide with the launch of the website. The booklet is available free of charge, and it can be downloaded from this free access website.
The sponsors of Irish Film & TV Research Online are:Trinity College Dublin.Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences’ Major Grant Scheme.Higher Education Authority’s North South Programme for Collaborative Research.Bord Scannán na hÉireann/Irish Film Board, and
