The Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland

The Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland is an all-island and international collaborative research project working to create a virtual reconstruction of the Public Record Office of Ireland, which was destroyed in the opening engagement of the Civil War on June 30th, 1922.

The team at VRTI partnered with Ebow for this revolutionary project; to bring these many millions of words from destroyed documents together in one digital platform, all freely available online to everyone, everywhere.

Our aim was to create a user-centered approach; working carefully with the team at VRTI to ensure that the interface accommodated the needs of their broad audience - from the general public to specialised academic researchers. 

We designed with clear hierarchies and structure in mind, basing the logic of our layouts on the underlying structure of the VRTI database.

Although this website is extremely complex, great care was taken to ensure that the experience of searching the treasury on a mobile is consistent with the desktop experience. Based on atomic principles, our design system ensures that each of the modules that comprise the overall website are built using similar elements and are therefore interchangeable and consistent; the result is a website that can expand to contain this ever expanding body of information, while retaining clarity and ease of use for those navigating the website. 

Through a combination of fully editable Wordpress pages and other pages dynamically populated from the VRTI database, we have created a seamless experience for both the lay user as well as the academic audience of historians and computer scientists.