Call for walk-in Kerry archive to showcase Kingdom’s ‘rich history, storytelling and folklore’

By Alastair Tibbs, The Kerryman

A Kerry councillor has called for a modern county archive to display the kingdom’s rich history and literary tradition for all to see.

Councillor Breandán Fitzgerald feels more of the county’s enormous archive deserves to be on display and doing so will attract more people to explore the collection.

Kerry Library in Tralee holds multiple collections, each with an inordinate number of documents.

The local history collection boasts over 7,000 books on Kerry and by Kerry authors, as well as local newspapers dating back to the early 19th Century and oral history recordings. The Kerry archives collection holds a dizzying array of material from ordnance survey maps to local family history, to photographic troves.

“The space is running out for the archive,” said Cllr Fitzgerald, “there’s a lot of material that’s not freely available to have a look at”.

“If people are going to donate archives of literary works of their own or of families we should have a proper archive, where people can go in and browse.

“I know, of course, you can’t just leave it open and have everybody walking around, you need management, but at the moment I would be afraid that a lot of material that has been donated is just being stored and not on display.”

While the archive in Kerry Library is often accessible due to a librarian and archivist being on hand, some of the archive still requires advance notice for viewing.

Exhibitions, like the O’Connell 250 exhibition in Cahersiveen, celebrate the county’s history but also advertise the abundance of Kerry’s archives to locals and visitors.

Cllr Fitzgerald believes a walk-in archive would help achieve the goal of promoting the collections and strengthening awareness of local history.

“Academics would have no problem accessing the documents, they’d be able to sit down and make an appointment…but they should be accessible to everybody,” said Cllr Fitzgerald.

“We definitely need a proper modern county archive where the rich history, storytelling and folklore that people have created should be on display. It’s the living narrative of the county.

“Who knows the young boy or young girl who may be inside the library and who could see the door to the archive and walk in there, and there’d be all these different works from famous Kerry men and women that had been donated to the county - you never know, they might get inspiration from the past.”

County Librarian, Tommy O’Connor, said Kerry Library had hired a new archivist and is working applying automation to help document the collection and make it more accessible online.

He said the library is growing at a “very strong rate” in Kerry and highlighting that while there was “phenomenal” growth in e-books, hard copy books continued to occupy the core of their business.

“There is increasing demand for people to come into libraries to study, to read the newspapers, and I consider it one of the few free social spaces that are available,” said Mr O’Connor.

“You find there is very little downtime in most of the libraries at this stage. People are continually in and out.”

“There’s a huge cross-section of ages using libraries. It’s a safe space really for students, older people and the various programmes we put on every year.”