PRONI Records on CAIN
About this section

The Public Records
This section within CAIN contains public records related to the conflict and politics in Northern Ireland that were selected from the collection held by the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI). The records mainly cover the years 1968 to 1999, with some additional records from 1964 and 1965 related to the issue of education. The selection of records was made to complement the key events and issues that are covered on CAIN.

The Digital Collection
Currently there are 4,338 PRONI public records on the CAIN site (comprised of approximately 18,240 pages). Since the launch in October 2010, the original collection of records has been extended 13 times.

Finding Records
The main method of locating records is via the search page. However it is also possible to browse lists of the documents. In addition links to PRONI records have also been added within the main CAIN Chronologies. These links are highlighted by the following image:

Record Citation
An example of a citation/reference for a record is as follows:
Future Policy Group. (1972). 'Future Policy Group: An Integration Solution', (25 August 1977), Paper from the Future Policy Group to W. Whitelaw, then Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, [PRONI Public Records CAB/9/J/90/10; 6 pages], [PDF; 912KB]. Belfast: PRONI. ... [16977]
This is made up of:
the author; the year the document was produced; the title of the record; an exact date - day, month, year - if available; a note - if required - to suplement the title; the PRONI reference number for the record; the number of pages; the type of digital file (all PDFs); the size of the digital file in kilobytes; the place when the file is stored (all Belfast); the holding organisation (all PRONI).

The Menu Bars
The above menu bar (the blue bar at the top of the page) provides links to information about the PRONI records on CAIN and also links to allow users to browse the records or use the search facility. This menu bar is used on all the pages related to the PRONI records.
The menu bar at the bottom of each page is a standard CAIN menu and contains links to the main CAIN Web site.

Access Keys
This section of CAIN uses a set of Access Keys.

Acknowledgements
Staff from both PRONI and CAIN worked together to select the relevant records, digitise them, and then prepare the Web pages on CAIN. The following were the main people involved:

• Management of project: David Huddleston (PRONI), Janet Hancock (PRONI), Carrie Green (PRONI), and Brendan Lynn (CAIN)
• Selection of documents: Brendan Lynn (CAIN)
• Scanning of documents: Carrie Green (PRONI)
• Preparation of PDF versions: Brendan Lynn (CAIN)
• Citations for documents: Brendan Lynn (CAIN)
• Web design and content: Brendan Lynn (CAIN), and Martin Melaugh (CAIN)
• Search programme: Mike McCool (INCORE)

Staff at CAIN would like thank PRONI for agreeing to the use of PRONI records at the CAIN Web site.

Launch
The new section on CAIN was launched on Wednesday 6 October 2010 at a public event on the Magee campus of the University of Ulster.

Updates
1980 files were made available on 7 Apr 2011.
1981 files available on 28 Jun 2012.
1982 files available on 26 Apr 2013.
1983-84 files available on 12 Aug 2014.
1985 files available on 16 Oct 2015.
1986 files available on 28 Jan 2016.
1987 files available on 10 Aug 2016.
1988-90 files (plus earlier years) available on 10 May 2018.
1991-92 files (plus earlier years) available on 20 Aug 2019.
1993-94 files (plus earlier years) available on 30 Jun 2021.
1995-96 files (plus earlier years) available on 17 Dec 2021 (list of 510 files).
1997-98 files (plus earlier years) available on 7 Dec 2022 (list of 491 files)
1999 files (plus earlier years) available on 14 Dec 2023 (list of 254 files)