The Irish Virtual Research Library and Archive (IVRLA) is a research project into digitisation and digital repository development for humanities researchers.  It is based in University College Dublin (UCD) and is a component of the Humanities Insititue of Ireland (HII).

The project was conceived as a means to preserve elements of UCD's main repositories and increase and facilitate access to this material through the adoption of digitisation technologies.  Additionally the project will undertake dedicated research into the area of interacting with and enhancing the use of digital objects in a humanities research environment through the development of a digital repository. When fully implemented, the IVRLA will be one of the first comprehensive digital primary source repositories in Ireland, and will advance the research agenda into the use and challenges affecting this new method of research, and of digital curation over the coming years.

The IVRLA was launched in September 2007 with an inital tranche of 12 collections (http://ivrla.ucd.ie) in addition to comprehensive documentation and reports including a workbook.  This is available at www.ucd.ie/ivrla/workbook/index4.html.

The IVLRA utilises the Feodra repository as its underlying architecture (www.fedora.info)