Inspiring Ireland, with a little help from Annertech

Annertech was very privileged to have the opportunity to work on such an exciting project as the “Inspiring Ireland” website which was funded by the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht and coordinated by the Royal Irish Academy. This first phase project is a pilot which marks the beginnings of a much larger programme to digitise, preserve, and share Ireland’s culture for public viewing, educational use and scholarly research.

Launched for St Patrick's Day 2014 by Minister Jimmy Deenihan in Stanford University, California, the website features an exhibition of images from the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) entitled “A Sense of Place,” which traces the way that “place”, in the most open and creative understanding of the term, resonates through Ireland’s art and artefacts. Future exhibitions scheduled for the website include “A Sense of Identity” and “A Sense of Freedom” - two developments Annertech is very much looking forward to engaging with.

This responsive website was built in Drupal 7 by Annertech's Andrew Macpherson (backend development) and Mark Conroy (backend and frontend development), with Mike King as project manager. We were very lucky to also have the expertise of the folks at the Trinity College Dublin, who wrote the API that was used for the project, on hand.

Annertech was quite chuffed to read the report in The Irish Times that accompanied the launch of the website.

Challenges Encountered and Overcome

• Create webpages on the fly via API calls to DRI servers
• Parse data from JSON feeds via API reference
• Display data on overlay boxes that respond to viewport size
• Faceted search for “objects” by subject, type, era, format, and institution
• Fully responsive website, adaptive at 5 different breakpoints