Bantry Museum, located in a small building behind Bantry Fire Station, off Wolfe Tone Square, was founded by volunteers from Bantry Historical & Archaeological Society (BHAS) to store and display our collection of historical artefacts.
As well as housing physical artefacts which are viewable by the public, Bantry Museum is also the location of BHAS’s reference library and archive, comprising multiple bookshelves filled with albums of hand-written and typed historical research, maps, newspaper clippings, and photographs.
BHAS intends to address the documentation, condition, storage, use and accessibility of the museum’s collections.
The first stage in this project involves completing an inventory of the museum’s artefacts and documents. Over the coming months, BH&AS volunteers will digitally photograph each item, and scan each document, and add these to a tagged and categorised and searchable online database. This database will include images of each item and details of its historical significance, as well as its age, provenance, copyright and ownership status, and condition, and other relevant information.
This online database will form part of a permanent digital museum, housed on BHAS’s existing website. The digital museum will feature rotating exhibitions, which will showcase the museum collection, providing international scholars and historians with access to the detailed local research carried out over the decades by BHAS members like Hazel Vickery, Joan O’Carroll, Paddy O’Keeffe, Donal Fitzgerald and others.
More details can be found in this introductory PDF:
