ABOUT THE PROJECT

The Dublin City Electoral Lists database was created as part of the Celtic Trí project, part-funded by the EU Interreg programme.

The surviving printed lists from 1937 to 1964 were scanned at high resolution, producing almost 49,000 scans. The results were then passed through an Optical Character Recognition process to produce rough Microsoft Excel files. These were then imported into a Microsoft Access database designed at Dublin City Library and Archive for correction, quality control and standardisation of first names, surnames and street names. Final Access databases for each of the years (c.300,000 records each) were then imported into the finished application, which uses MySQL in conjunction with the PHP scripting language. The versions of the scanned pages used in the application are compressed DjVU created from the original high quality scans.

Digiscan Ltd carried out the scanning and OCR.
John Grenham, as Dublin City Library and Archive genealogist-in-residence, did the database design, quality control, correction and standardisation.
The final MySQL/PHP application was developed by KCO Ltd.