The project was launched in UCC on 20 November by Róisín O’Brien on behalf of the Digital Arts and Humanities Programme, with the composer’s daughter Dr Ruth Fleischmann as the guest of honour.

The digitisation of the diaries was undertaken by O’Brien as a thesis project for the Masters Degree in Digital Arts and Humanities at UCC. In addition to the preservation of artefacts through photography and online publication, the aim of the project was to create a freely available digitisation prototype for scholars and non-experts. A dissertation, ‘Digitising the Diaries of Aloys Fleischmann: a prototype for novices’, will be distributed as an Open Access publication at the Cork Open Research Archive.

Aloys Fleischmann (1910-1992) was born into a family of immigrant German musicians resident in Cork since 1879. His maternal grandfather, Hans Conrad Swertz, had come from the Bavarian town of Dachau to take up a post as organist and choirmaster. The second of his nine children, Tilly, born in Cork in 1882, studied in Munich at the Royal Academy of Music from 1901-1905; she married the Dachau organist and composer Aloys Fleischmann, who came to Cork with her the following year to take over her father’s position at the cathedral.

Their son Aloys was to become a composer, musicologist, scholar of traditional Irish music, professor of music at University College Cork 1934–1980, founder and conductor of the Cork Symphony Orchestra 1934–1992, founder of the Cork Orchestral Society in 1938, of the Cork International Choral Festival and its director for 20 years, provider of music for the Cork Ballet Company for 45 years, chairman of the Cork Sculpture Park for 24 years, and a campaigner for classical music in Ireland.

The diaries were written during his last two years at school. About 200 photographs selected from Tilly Fleischmann’s albums illustrate the online collection.

To view the archive, visit http://fleischmanndiaries.ucc.ie/