Just a note about additional content that we are developing for Ireland’s infant “Digital Library.”
For the time being content will appear on our own modest Ireland Library page, bringing the more or less sophisticated digital project (part of our comsortium digitization resource) together with home grown material we have done ourselves, which means in less than ideal pdf formats, using our slow and cumbersome equipment….
Here’s how the baby steps we are taking line up for now:
We have already written in this blog some about the first two small collections.
 Native American Texts : http://content.clic.edu/cdm4/browse.php?CISOROOT=%2Fnative-pam
Our library owns a few choice Christian missionary items, most in Dakota or Ojibwa.
 Temperance Tracts
http://content.clic.edu/cdm4/browse.php?CISOROOT=%2Ftemp-pamph
Selection from our collection (many came to the library from Archbishop John Ireland, 1838-1918).
The next two are new additions of individual works, chosen as much as exemplars as for content. John Ireland’s biography of Bishop Cretin is an example of what, in library parlance, might be called an “association item.” Unfished at the time of his death and in a difficultly “rotund” style as biography the work itself is less significant to us than the fact that it is written by our namesake, and not published beyond a local history magazine, the final installment appearing the year he died.
The Catholic hymnal is a different exemplar, one of creative destruction, if you will. This small book is in such terrible condition with brittle acidic paper in typically ephemeral binding, that it was impossible to repair, or even really handle. In consultation with our superb conservator, Sheila Hague, we decided to disbind it and scan as a preservation measure, even though this in fact destroyed the original.
 John Ireland’s Life of Bishop Cretin in pdf
http://www.stthomas.edu/libraries/ireland/theologyguides/cretinbio.html
Serialized biography of Joseph Cretin, Minnesota’s first bishop.
 Catholic Youth’s Hymn Book (1871) in pdf
http://www.stthomas.edu/libraries/collections/digital/documents/hymn_book1.pdf
Scarce collection of hymn texts — our copy had severely deteriorated