The Kilkenny Design Workshops Archive – Life before the Collection Management Project

The KDW archive is by far the largest and one of the most important Special Collections held by the National Irish Visual Arts Library.  From 2001, when the collection was donated to the library by the Crafts Council of Ireland, until 2008, when grant aid was sourced to develop the cataloguing project, the collection was housed in its original packing in many filing cabinets in a library store room located off campus.  The size of the collection meant that it simply could not fit into the main library space and the small number of library staff made it impossible to allocate sufficient man-hours to conducting a detailed inventory of the material.

In order to facilitate researchers interested in studying the collection, materials had to be removed from the cabinets and boxed into crates and carried from the store room to the NIVAL reading area.  As the collection was neither catalogued nor classified, it was difficult to advice researchers whether the area they were interested in was documented in our collection.  Equally, it was not always easy to guarantee that all materials relevant to the researcher’s topic could be located and retrieved.   Several notable researchers accessed the archive at this time, including Anna Moran, Joanna Quinn, and Paul Caffrey.  Indeed, when researching the exhibition catalogue Designing Ireland in 2003/04, Joanna Quinn spent several days working on her own in the off-site store room - so broad was the scope of her research and so strong was her determination to leave no stone unturned!

The KDW Collection Management Project has allowed NIVAL to appraise the archive in its entirety and to arrange and catalogue the contents to internationally recognized standards for archival description.  The project has enabled us to examine the various components of the collection, to decipher the original classification system applied to the collection by the KDW, and to identify relationships between the component parts.  As such, a once unwieldy and somewhat intimidating collection of material has become an extremely user-friendly resource – an information-rich visual chronology of the extraordinary work undertaken by both the designers and administrators of the Kilkenny Design Workshops. 

The generous supporters of the KDW Collection Management Project should be congratulated for their contribution to our ongoing effort to enhance the accessibility and research value of this remarkable collection.  The Heritage Council, the Design History Society, UK, the NCAD Seed Fund for Research and the Arts Council, our funding partner - THANK YOU!