The Computers in Education Society of Ireland (CESI), founded in 1973 as a voluntary, cross-sectoral community of practice, was a 2024 recipient of the Digital Repository of Ireland's Community Archive Scheme. CESI has long held the ambition to digitally preserve and share fifty years of newsletters, conference programmes, and ephemera, assigning each item a DOI and Creative Commons license. The DRI's support has catalysed this work, providing training, infrastructure, and stability for our voluntary organisation whose records could otherwise remain at risk of loss.

Against the unrelenting GenAI discourse, this project invites us to pause and reflect on the people that shaped technology adoption in Irish education. We are ingesting materials from the 1980s through the early 2010s, documenting technological advancements, national events, and professional development in Irish education. Creating metadata has provided an opportunity to recognise "openness as a living project" — honouring the volunteers who have sustained this community (Bozkurt et al., 2023).

This Gasta shares practical lessons from the archiving process, highlighting the value of capturing "fleeting, ephemeral moments to give them permanency and lasting purpose" for future educators and researchers by preserving the history of technology in Irish education (Molloy et al., 2025, pp. 1135).