About this website

Objective

This website provides a crowdsourcing tool for pooling, storing and sharing data about minor placenames. Meitheal Logainm.ie gives users the opportunity to promote the toponymic heritage of the country in the digital age by mapping and sharing minor placenames online. This will enable the preservation of minor placenames and minor placename data, as well as raising public awareness on the subject. The website is being developed by Gaois, Fiontar & Scoil na Gaeilge, DCU, in collaboration with the Placenames Branch of the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media. The Placenames Database of Ireland (logainm.ie) is also being developed by Gaois, Fiontar & Scoil na Gaeilge in collaboration with the Placenames Branch. Meitheal Logainm.ie was launched at the SNSBI pre-conference workshop entitled Tools for sharing minor placenames on the 14th April 2016.

What are minor placenames? Minor placenames, in the context of this project, are placenames other than administrative placenames and population centres. Administrative placenames include the names of counties, baronies, civil parishes, townlands and electoral divisions. Population centres include the names of cities, towns, villages and street names. Minor placenames include physical features (e.g. lakes, rivers, bays, headlands, islands, mountains, hills), and names of man-made features (e.g. ring forts, churches, abbeys, graveyards, bridges, crossroads). logainm.ie is the authoritative resource for Irish administrative placenames. Field names are an excellent example of minor placenames. Field names have no official status or administrative function, but they are extremely important inasmuch as they contain information on a local level regarding settlement patterns, agriculture and industry, amongst other things. Unfortunately, information regarding field names is not as widespread as it once was due to demographic shifts, and thus it is vital that minor placenames be collected before they are forgotten. We hope that Meitheal Logainm.ie can help those who wish to record the field names in their own localities. Click here for more information regarding the research which has been carried out to date by researchers and community groups on the minor placenames of Ireland.

Meitheal Logainm.ie vs logainm.ie

Meitheal Logainm.ie is a separate website to logainm.ie. The data on Meitheal Logainm.ie is not validated by the Placenames Branch nor by Gaois, Fiontar & Scoil na Gaeilge. There may be differences between the local forms of placenames provided by the public through Meitheal Logainm.ie and the official Irish-language forms provided by the Placenames Branch through logainm.ie which are based on local and historical forms as well as other evidence.

There is a facility for users to easily switch between the two websites using tabs at the top of the screen. Searches made on this site are linked with searches on logainm.ie. If there are results in logainm.ie for a search made on this site, and vice versa, the results will be presented in a box at the bottom of the page.

Mapping

The map on Meitheal Logainm.ie, MapGenie Premium, is provided by Ordnance Survey Ireland (OSi). It is a different OSi map to the one on logainm.ie, MapGenie, because a more detailed map is needed for Meitheal Logainm.ie so that users can zoom in to click on minor features.

Further developments

We aim to add further functions to the site as the project develops. We are currently investigating the possibility of adding more detailed Ordnance Survey maps to the site.