ARK (www.ark.ac.uk), the Northern Ireland Social and Political Archive, is a web resource based jointly at Queen's University Belfast and the University of Ulster. Its central aim is to exploit the web to make social and political material on Northern Ireland available to the widest possible audience. As such, its users will consist of academics, government policy makers, students, school children, the media, local voluntary groups and the general public. This necessitates information being available in a variety of formats, ranging from web pages through interactive searchable databanks and downloadable data sets at one end of a continuum to traditional printed papers at the other.
ARK provides a unified, searchable interface that allows access to a wide spectrum of material on the social and political life of Northern Ireland. Behind this interface are a range of resources which provide access to different types of both quantitative and qualitative information:
Therefore, data, dissemination and discovery are key foci of ARK's work:
This paper will describe the experience of the ARK team in recent years as well as describing its plans and ongoing programmes of work. The technical, financial, quality and contextual issues and problems encountered by developing and maintaining such an archive will be highlighted, as well as the need for such an archive to exist.
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