In September 2009, Chancellor Marty Meehan and Provost Ahmed Abdelal established the Center for Irish Partnerships at UMass Lowell, one of six international partnership centers. The aim of these centers is to strengthen and coordinate ongoing international partnerships as well as to develop new education and research collaborations in areas of the world that pose strategically important opportunities. The Center has had four directors: Dr. Frank Talty, Dr. Stephen McCarthy, Professor Ann Marie Hurley, and Victoria Denoon. John Wooding, Erin Caples, and Ruairi O'Mahony are the Partnership's present co-directors. In 2018, the Center transferred its archives to the UMass Lowell Libraries Special Collections.
The collection is consists of approximately 1 linear foot of folders organized in alphabetical order by category; the categories are as follows: Agreements, Belfast, Belfast Hockey, CIP Press Clippings, CIP Reports/Publications, Correspondence, Derry and Northwest Ireland, Donegal Diaspora, Faculty Mini-Grants, Irish-American Heritage Archeological Project, Itineraries, Irish Echo Golden Bridges Conferences, Irish in Massachusetts, Mary McAleese Visit, N.U.I. Galway, Presentations, Press Magazines, Research Materials, Speaker Series, US/Ireland Emerging Technologies Conference, and Women and Leadership UML--QUB Conferences. These folders consist of documents, pamphlets, and photographs. The full inventory for the collection can be found here.
UMass Lowell Libraries has made available on its official Internet Archive page a selection of digitized items from across the collection that represent the full breadth of the Center's activities. The items have been digitized inline with best archival standards and practices, and, where possible, uploaded in full high-definition TIFF files. Using the Wayback Machine, UML Libraries has also archived the Center's official UML webpage to be viewed at any time after it is taken down.
