Digitised a community centre archive nobody could read
Nino Beridze is an archivist and historian from Tbilisi with a postgraduate qualification in archival science from the University of Georgia. She arrived in Cork in 2022 and spent fourteen months working in retail while her qualifications underwent assessment.
At her local community centre, she discovered a storage room containing what she estimated to be sixty years of community photographs, documents, and newsletters — all unorganised, some deteriorating.
She proposed a digitisation project to the centre's committee. They said yes, but had no budget. Nino sourced a donated flatbed scanner, borrowed archival storage materials from the Cork City Library, and began work on evenings and weekends.
Over eight months she digitised over 2,400 items — photographs, newsletters, event programmes, minutes of meetings. She catalogued each item with date, subject, and context, and built a simple searchable online archive accessible through the centre's website.
The archive has since been used in a local history project, a school exhibition, and a documentary short. Three families have contacted the centre after finding photographs of relatives they had never seen.
Nino is now employed as a part-time archivist at a Cork museum. She still volunteers at the community centre on Saturdays.