Ireland's Great Hunger Museum at Quinnipiac University is launching a digital database with about 1,500 articles and illustrations related to Ireland and the Great Famine.

The electronic library will feature pictorial newspaper items from the Great Hunger of 1845 to 1852 and will be available via the Ireland's Great Hunger Museum website at www.ighm.org . It's scheduled to open today.

The resource will be available to students, scholars, historians and others at no cost.

The database will include illustrated newspapers and publications such as "The Illustrated London News," "Punch" and "The Pictorial Times."

Ireland's Great Hunger Museum acquired the volumes of the pictorial newspapers from Kennys Bookshop and Art Gallery in Galway, Ireland.

Quinnipiac says scholars and others have worked on making the resource accessible to the public for over a year.