I've spent quite a bit of time freshening up the look of the site this week as I'd realised that in my quest to share lots of information with you all, I was in danger of creating a book instead of a website.  Yes, there's still a lot of text but I've also finally got around to using some original photos that my partner, Wiggy, took whilst we enjoyed a fabulously sunny (no joke!) holiday in Ireland in 2016.  

This lovely photo was taken on a typical "soft" Irish day when it was raining gently and 2 swans were necking downstream - beautiful.


So, what can you expect to find on the new look site?  Lots of lovely photos that bring the text to life and illustrate some of the things I'm trying to describe better.  The Welcome page is also a lot more welcoming I hope and much clearer with respect to what you can expect to find and how to navigate, and explains that, no, you won't find any potato recipes despite the odd tabs (although, I don't know, maybe I should post a few?)! 

​I've moved a few things around to make the 3 main sections a bit clearer as to how the content relates to each other and I've made my unique finding aids easier to find.  There are also a few new sections, including a list of questions that are answered across the pages under "What's for Dinner" - great if you are pondering a people puzzle.  There is also an updated section on Trinity College Dublin students under Student Days (see also the preceding blog post for some more insight on this resource.)

I've also been inspired to think about some new content, so do come back again soon over the next few weeks to see what's new dishes are served up!

Bon Appetit!

I recently came across a link to a revised digital edition of Alumni Dublinenses, available for free on Trinity College Dublin's (TCD) digital collections page and which I've written about on my new Student Days page.  I had previously accessed this resource through Find My Past (FMP), playing the usual game of letterbox Scrabble to try to find scholarly relatives. 

However, finding the whole book in a digital form was a bit of revelation.  Reading the Preface proved to be most illuminating on how the actual resource came into existence through the sterling efforts of the 2 illustriously named authors (the untimely demise of one of whom we also learn about in the same Preface!)



Basically, the authors wrestled with multiple fairly elderly documents, mostly written in Latin and with sizeable gaps, to create one new unified resource, first published in 1924.  To achieve this, they had to make lexical and biographical decisions along the way in order to be able to match up the same students across multiple original sources to arrive at a concise paragraph summarising their days and achievements at TCD.  By the time the revised edition came out in 1936, they were not only able to add just over a decade of later students (whom you won't find on FMP), but also issued several pages of corrections to the first edition - again something you won't find out about through FMP.

So the morals of this tale are, firstly, don't assume that it is exactly the same resource that appears to be available in different locations - check it's pedigree very carefully(insofar as FMP's execrable source citations let you of course!)  And secondly, take some time to understand how the document you are searching came into existence and be more alert to the potential for possible transcription errors and omissions.  I've tried to summarise what I gleaned from the Preface into some advice on my Student Days page, so hope that helps.