The Limerick eArchives Portal is a result of a joint initiative between Limerick City Council, Shannon Development and Limerick County Council.

The project was funded by Shannon Broadband and the European Commission under the Interreg IIIC – ESTIIC programme. Shannon Broadband is a consortium of local and regional development authorities in the Shannon Region of Ireland whose primary focus is on stimulating the development of eInfrastructure and eContent across the region (see www.shannonbroadband.com).

The project was completed as part of a wider initiative involving regions from across European cooperating in the area of stimulating broadband usage and adopting best practices in making public sector broadband content more accessible and increasing its quality.

The project builds on the excellent work of Limerick Archives and their own internal intitiative to update their catalogues to international standard ISAD(G). Because of the availability of ISAD(G) compliant catalogues, it was decided by the Board of Shannon Broadband that this project would illustrate best practice in the adoption of interoperability standards and the online publication of public sector information in the Shannon Region.

The primary deliverable of the project was EAD compliant files and that these are maintained on an open source, standards based archives platform. The primary rationale for this decision was to address issues of future interoperability, portability, accessibility particularly in light of national and international developments. The approach also supports the European Commission approach of promoting the increased use of OSS for such initiatives, an area where Ireland has lagged other European countries in the past.