Irish Film & TV Research Online is a website designed to bring together the wide diversity of research material relating to Irish-made cinema and television as well as to Irish-themed audio-visual representations produced outside of Ireland. It incorporates two searchable databases: Irish Film & Television Index 1896-2006 and Irish Film Censors' Records 1923-1938. It also makes nine Irish Silent Films 1910-15 available on its webpages. The project is based in the School of Creative Arts, Trinity College Dublin.
The impetus for the Irish Film & Television Index was Kevin Rockett's The Irish Filmography: Fiction Films 1896 - 1996 (1996), which documented all fiction films made in Ireland and about Ireland and the Irish produced worldwide since the beginnings of cinema. Under the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences' Major Grant Scheme, 2003-05, funding was awarded to update the original filmography and to document, with the same worldwide remit, all major non-fiction films, including newsreels, and animation, made for cinema and television. In addition to the IRCHSS, the other sponsors of the project are Trinity College Dublin; the Higher Education Authority's North South Programme for Collaborative Research, 2003-06 and Bord Scannán na hÉireann/Irish Film Board, 2006.
From 2003 to 2006, filmographer and archivist Eugene Finn expanded the database which, incorporating the original Irish Filmography, has drawn on the archival and paper records of many of the world's leading film archives and specialist libraries, including ones in Ireland, Britain, the USA, and Australia. The project is especially grateful for the on-going support received from the Irish Film Institute's archive and library. At present the Irish Film & Television Index has almost 40,000 titles. Work on this archive ceased in 2006.
The website is available to use on www.tcd.ie/irishfilm.
