The Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine (DAFM) is seeking to procure the services of archivists for the transfer of Irish Land Commission (ILC) records to the National Archives.
The department has published a tender for a 12-month pilot cataloguing and re-housing project.
This project will help to devise a comprehensive project plan for cataloguing all of the records of the former Irish Land Commission.
That plan will also enable the department to estimate the resources required to deliver the full cataloguing and preservation project, as well as the costs and timeframe for delivery.
Land Commission
DAFM previously told Agriland that the transfer of Land Commission records to the National Archives could take up to 15 years to complete.
Established in 1881 under the Lands Act, the commission’s primary role was to oversee the dissolution of large land estates and enable tenants to purchase the subdivided holdings.
Following independence in 1923, the ILC continued to acquire and distribute estates and administered land purchase schemes.
The commission was dissolved in March 1999 and its historic records were transferred to the department of agriculture.
The DAFM records branch unit in Portlaoise contains up to 11 million individual records produced by the former land commission, including wills, deeds, maps, estate records, family trees, rent books and correspondence.
DAFM
DAFM said that the successful tenderer will be contracted to carry out sorting, cataloguing, numbering, rehousing of the Land Commission records, and will liaise with National Archives’ staff in preparation for future transfer.
The contract, which has a value of €150,000 excluding VAT, will comprise a team lead by a senior archivist and two archivists all working full-time on-site in the Records Branch, Clonminam, Co. Laois.
The department said that the pilot project will form the basis of a complete listing of the records of the Land Commission, through the creation of practical workflows and procedures for all records series.
The deadline for receipt of tenders is 5:00p.m on Tuesday, January, 2025.