Announcing the Professor Cooley archive at Waterford Institute of Technology, Ireland: a celebration of the legacy of Mike Cooley

摘要

Waterford Institute of Technology is delighted to announce that it has acquired by donation from the Cooley Family the entire archive of Professor Michael Cooley. The collection, which has been donated via the INSYTE Centre and is now housed at the Luke Wadding Library at WIT, includes over 1400 items with photographs, correspondences, journals, books, drawings, videos, cassette tapes, slides and other content and media. The acquisition is of enormous academic significance, and institute librarians are actively curating this large and complex collection which is available to the Irish and international scholarly community. We warmly welcome students and scholars to avail of this important resource. Born in 1934, Michael Cooley was raised in a small, tightly knit rural community in the west of Ireland. He grew up in a period of economic privation the Irish people refer to as the "Economic War" and "the Emergency". During these times, trade restrictions on Irish exports and the shortages as a result of World War 2 inflicted great hardship in Ireland. To survive, small rural communities had to be creative, resourceful and, most important of all, they had to pull together, valuing what each person could offer in service of the collective in terms of skill and wisdom, resources and care.