QUALITATIVE ARCHIVE OF THE NORTHERN IRELAND CONFLICT The conflict in Northern Ireland over the last 35 years has generated a vast body of qualitative material such as interviews, video and audio recordings, photographs etc. that can be utilised to address the issues of violence and reconciliation. In keeping with the philosophy of the ARK Project, the existence of the catalogue means that anyone - from academic researchers and documentary film the collation of information about qualitative material covering the 35 year span of 'the Troubles' in Northern Ireland (content, availability, recording format etc.) into a single catalogue particularly in instances where the material is 'at risk' of being lost, the project will take steps to procure or copy the material and lodge it with ESDS Qualidata at the UK Data Archive at the University of Essex Effective use of the bulk of this material, however, has been thwarted by its wide dispersion, much of it located outside Northern Ireland, and the lack of any central index or cataloguing system. The situation has been that some people may know quite a bit about some of the material but no one has a comprehensive overview of it all. This project centres on: The Northern Ireland Conflict Archive is a constituent part of ARK. The ARK Project - a Social and Political Archive for Northern Ireland - is a joint resource between the two Northern Ireland universities, the Queen’s University, Belfast and the University of Ulster. ACCESSING THE NI CONFLICT ARCHIVE As such, it can be accessed by going to the ARK web site – and selecting NIQA from the ‘Explore ARK’ menu. Alternatively, the Conflict Archive can be entered directly by going to Both routes link to the searchable database. THE ARK PROJECT ARK was established in 2000 and has the goal of making social science information on Northern Ireland available to the widest possible range of constituencies. THE PROJECT makers to secondary school students and interested members of the general public - will be able to quickly discover the scope of qualitative material on the Northern Ireland 'Troubles' that is held in archives and collections and will know how to go about viewing or obtaining access to the material. The completed catalogue will be available to the public through ARK and takes the form of an online searchable database. This exploratory project was funded under the ESRC Qualitative Archiving and Data Sharing Scheme (QUADS), a small initiative running from April 2005 to October Co-ordinated by ESDS Qualidata at Essex, the scheme is dedicated to the mission of learning more about sharing, representation and re- use of qualitative data, in all of its disparate shape and forms. QUADS DEMONSTRATOR PROJECTS

SEARCHING THE DATABASE THE PROJECT TEAM Martin Melough (Co-Investigator) Robert Miller (Principal Investigator) Peter McLoughlin (Research Assistant) NI Conflict Archive, ARK Project School of Sociology, Social Policy and Social Work Queen’s University Belfast BT7 1NN Northern Ireland Tel: +44 (028) URL: The database allows searches on four criteria: author/investigator words in title or abstract a set of topic categories year of research Once a record has been retrieved, clicking on its title brings up the complete record, consisting of information on the following fields: CONTACT title principal investigator(s) description/abstract contact details of holder/depositor access conditions and availability sponsors subject categories and main topics study and fieldwork dates geographic area type of data units of observation and method of data collection sampling details (population, weighting, N) publications language copyright SEARCH RESULTS QUALITATIVE ARCHIVE OF THE NORTHERN IRELAND CONFLICT