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.
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.
RSS Feed
