​The IQDA is a founding member of the Digital Repository of Ireland, a national trusted digital repository for Ireland's social and cultural data. The repository links together and preserves both historical and contemporary data held by Irish institutions, providing a central internet access point and interactive multimedia tools. As a national e-infrastructure for the future of education and research in the humanities and social sciences, DRI is available for use by the public, students and scholars. The DRI was officially launched by Damien English TD, Minister for Skills, Research and Innovation on the 25th of June 2015. View the IQDA data collections on the DRI here. 

    The 'Irish Lifetimes' demonstrator project
    Ireland is now in a period of commemoration and the Irish Lifetimes project allows us to explore a century of Irish life through the stories and memories of its people. Built on qualitative data archived at the IQDA, Irish Lifetimes is a digital resource that documents the everyday lives of Irish people, including some of our oldest residents, from the foundation of the Irish State to the present day. This compilation of personal accounts captures everyday life over the last 100 years of the nation's development and grants us exceptional insight into the ways in which Irish society has changed and how it has remained the same.​

    Irish Lifetimes from Digital Repository of Ireland on Vimeo.

    ​Contributed by the IQDA in 2014-15, Irish Lifetimes demonstrates the capacity of the DRI to provide innovative, value-added processing and delivery of qualitative social science data to researchers, educators and policy-makers; establish and maintain rigorous standards for research documentation and the preservation of informant confidentiality; and to open up funded research outputs to new user communities.  Irish Lifetimes is composed of a number of pre-existing collections that are held at the IQDA and these data were ingested into the DRI repository throughout 2014 and 2015. The story of a century of Irish life is told through media of qualitative interview transcripts and audio clips, life histories, photographs and children's essays, and thereby demonstrates the particular value and character of qualitative data. For more information on the DRI please visit: www.dri.ie