wee doors banging

PRONI, the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland, have launched a searchable archive of Belfast Street Directories dating back as far as 1819.

Street Directories are books containing a listing of the names, addresses and occupations of the inhabitants of Belfast as well as lists of commercial establishments operating in the city, and so are a vital resource for historical and genealogical researchers. Having them easily searchable online is a big step forward.

PRONI write:

The street directories featured on this website consist of original volumes held by the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) covering the years 1819 to 1900 [...] These volumes, which were previously on open access in the Search Room in PRONI, were very heavily used and the paper in some of the volumes is very fragile. They were therefore at risk as pages or parts of pages had already been lost or damaged and further handling would have endangered their long term preservation. As such, it was decided to scan the directories and to provide a search facility which would enable users to find key words in a section of a directory, in a particular directory or in any directories.

The Street Directory search website was developed in Java using Apple’s WebObjects technology and uses the open source Lucene index engine to search the Street Directory contents by a number of criteria. Pages from the directories are available either as PNG format images or DjVu documents.

The Belfast and Ulster Directory 1890, pages 168-169

I worked on this project when it first started off, developing the initial data importer and converter for the scanned images and accompanying OCR’d text and web interface, but there have been quite a few changes since I left the project (and the company) and, I’m told, a few speedbumps along the way too. Congratulations are due to all concerned for getting the site launched and making these important resources available to all!

Visit PRONI to search the Belfast Street Directory archives.