Exiting Belfast stage left

Wow, where did the week go. It's amazing how quickly time flies when you have lots of work to do. Well my journal of this dissertation research trip is quickly coming to its conclusion and I'll have to move on to other dissertation and life related things to write about. I've got next week in London before going home. But first a recap of this week's activities.

As I already mentioned, I spent Monday at the Royal British Legion in Belfast. Both Tuesday and Wednesday I spent long days at the Belfast Central Library. Since a lot of what I'm doing looks like it is going to rely pretty heavily on newspapers. The Belfast Central Newspaper Library was the best place to work with newspapers thus far. The main advantage of the BCL is that they have no problem bringing out bound volumes of newspapers. Most places tend to rely heavily on microfilm. That's not to say the BCL doesn't have it's share of microfilm, but for the major Belfast area newspapers, which I was most interested in, were all available in hard copy. So what's the big deal you might ask? My digital camera can take pictures of a microfilm machine screen and produce useable images. They are not the best, but they are certainly usable. A lot, of course, depends on the quality of the film itself. With the hard copies you don't have to worry about the quality of the film. Most of the papers I looked at were in good condition and I got really good quality pictures from them.

On Thursday, I took the train to Bangor followed by a bus toward Newtownards to the Somme Heritage Centre. I spent the day there going through some of the sources they had there. Noel Cain and the other people at the Somme Centre were very friendly and accommodating. The centre was really cool. It was the type of place I would love go with my Dad because I know he'd really like it (Dad, since I know you're reading, you have your charge: Going to Northern Ireland with me). Oh, and I managed to leave my umbrella either at the train station in Belfast or on the Bangor train. Note: this is NOT a good thing in Ireland. As Murphy's Law would have it, when I left the Somme Centre it was raining pretty hard and I got drenched.

Friday, I went back to the BCL and finished up another run of papers. When I was in the Republic they had a number of newspapers digitized and completely searchable, which made the process of finding relevant information a lot easier. In the North, however, there are no papers that are completely digitized so I had to go through microfilm and hard copies. Since memory/commemoration of the First World War in Ireland most prominently coincides with Remembrance Day my strategy for attacking papers in microfilm and hard copy consisted of this: I would select a paper - this week it was the Belfast Newsletter, the Belfast Telegraph, the Northern Whig, and the Irish News, Belfast. I would request the papers from the month of November from 1919-1939. I would have liked to go further into the future but Belfast had three good papers (the Irish News, Belfast started strong and faded fast) and I wanted to get through all of them. Plus, after 1939, the commemoration of WWI veterans changes because of WWII so the 1919-1939 period is the principal concern.

So it was a very productive week in terms of research. Or at least I hope so. The other issue that developed was with so many pictures I'm starting to run out of hard drive space on my computer. I was at Tesco the other night and bought some blank DVDs. I've backed up all of the photos I've taken on DVD. Probably not a bad idea. Given what happened with my PRONI notes, I'd prefer to err on the side of caution.

So that's the update for now. I leave Belfast tomorrow for London and after a week I FINALLY go home. I understand why people need to spend 6-12 months engaged in research based on my experiences here. But I don't know how people can spend so much time away from home. I guess most people have some sort of funding, and when the dollar was strong it would be a bit easier. Yet, it remains a difficult thing to manage. So as worthwhile as the trip has been I am certainly ready to go home.

All for now.