A Century of Recovery – and Beyond - Marking the centenary of the Four Courts fire (1922) and the launch of the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland

12 Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland 50M words of searchable text spanning 7 centuries 2.7M linked-data entities 150,000+ database records 6,000+ maps created with the support of 70+ archival partners The Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland is the outcome of a five-year State-funded programme of research entitled ‘Beyond 2022’. Our mission has been to re-imagine and re-create through virtual reality the Public Record Office of Ireland (PROI) buildings and archival collections. Led by researchers at Trinity College Dublin, the programme combined historical investigation, archival conservation, and technical innovation to re-imagine and recreate, through digital technologies, the archive lost on June 30th, 1922, in the opening engagement of the Civil War. This State legacy project is an investment in Ireland’s digital futures beyond the centenary—an open-access resource, freely and permanently available online to all those interested in Ireland’s deep history at home and abroad. Our extensive and growing treasury of digitized records—scattered over space and time, but now reunited on- screen—brings ordinary lives buried in official documents back into the light. In 1922 , the Record Treasury contained 100,000 square feet of archival shelving organized into 4,500 series of records accumulated over 7 centuries. It was destroyed in 1 afternoon. Through our immersive Web3D experience, online visitors can re-enter the beautiful reading room of the PROI, as it appeared on the eve of its destruction, and explore its reconstructed collections. Exciting developments in linked data and knowledge graph technologies enable all users to delve deeper into our digitized collections, identifying connections between people and places across seven centuries of Irish history.