An open letter to the National Archives of Ireland

[pwaldron]

[I have just sent this e-mail to tab@nationalarchives.ie. It is not specifically Clare-related but may be of interest to some readers of this forum.]

I greatly appreciate everything that the National Archives has put on line free of charge for genealogists, but it is annoying when I, as a perceived expert user of the NAI website, am asked to solve problems experienced by less expert users of the website.

I had a phone call this evening from someone technically challenged, on behalf of someone even more technically challenged, asking me to find the TAB for Aglishcloghane (Co. Tipperary) on the NAI website.

Thanks to John Grenham's talk at the NLI last week, I had some idea how to tackle this problem. I should have started with John's Irish Times column of last November on this topic, at
http://www.irishtimes.com/blogs/irishro ... the-books/
but instead I seem to have reinvented the wheel. First, I tried Google, but as John refers to Aglishcloghane as Aglish, it didn't find the relevant column.

Incidentally, it doesn't appear to be widely known that search results can be viewed 100-per-page (rather than in the 10-per-page format of the link from the above column) using a URL of the form

http://titheapplotmentbooks.nationalarc ... geSize=100

Anyway, I duly found that the records transcribed from all 17 images for Aglishcloghane have indeed apparently been entered into the database under the previous parish on the microfilm, namely Aglish (Co. Waterford). The PDF versions of these images are at

http://titheapplotmentbooks.nationalarc ... _00234.pdf
http://titheapplotmentbooks.nationalarc ... _00235.pdf
http://titheapplotmentbooks.nationalarc ... _00236.pdf
http://titheapplotmentbooks.nationalarc ... _00237.pdf
http://titheapplotmentbooks.nationalarc ... _00238.pdf
http://titheapplotmentbooks.nationalarc ... _00239.pdf
http://titheapplotmentbooks.nationalarc ... _00240.pdf
http://titheapplotmentbooks.nationalarc ... _00241.pdf
http://titheapplotmentbooks.nationalarc ... _00242.pdf
http://titheapplotmentbooks.nationalarc ... _00243.pdf
http://titheapplotmentbooks.nationalarc ... _00244.pdf
http://titheapplotmentbooks.nationalarc ... _00245.pdf
http://titheapplotmentbooks.nationalarc ... _00246.pdf
http://titheapplotmentbooks.nationalarc ... _00247.pdf
http://titheapplotmentbooks.nationalarc ... _00248.pdf
http://titheapplotmentbooks.nationalarc ... _00249.pdf
and
http://titheapplotmentbooks.nationalarc ... _00250.pdf

I know how stretched the resources of the National Archives are, but
http://titheapplotmentbooks.nationalarc ... /index.jsp
does say:
"Errors with regard to location of parishes in counties will also be rectified as soon as possible."
and this particular error has been highlighted in Ireland's newspaper of record almost nine months ago.

I also note that the text at
http://titheapplotmentbooks.nationalarc ... b/home.jsp
was not future-proofed; the last sentence is now happily out-of-date.

[pwaldron]

I received this prompt reply from the National Archives of Ireland:

We are awaiting a full new copy of the TAB database from the LDS, which
will hopefully clear up the issues you have helpfully highlighted. They
made a mess of the first outing, and we have brought this to their
attention.
Thanks, as always, for your support.