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Jonathan Swift was one of the most renowned authors of his day, well known in literary circles in Great Britain and Ireland, and an encourager of fledgling writers.

At the end of the 1720s Jonathan Swift was at the height of his literary powers, he had published the best-selling Travels into several remote nations of the world by Lemuel Gulliver (Gulliver’s travels) in 1726, which had run to many editions by the end of the decade, he had written extensively on Irish affairs and was a household name in Dublin and London. Swift was well connected in the literary and social world, he was a friend and correspondent of poet Alexander Pope, and dramatists John Gay and William Congreve.Image right: Engraved portrait of SwiftHe kept up to date with literary trends and purchased books by contemporary authors. In 1728 a young French author living in London published a new version of his historical poem in French, called La Henriade, written in praise of King Henri IV of France.  François Marie Arouet de Voltaire (1694-1778) published his poem by subscription and the subscription list reveals his important patrons and supporters. Swift was a friend and correspondent of Voltaire’s, they were probably introduced by their mutual friend Alexander Pope. When Swift intended to visit France in June 1727 Voltaire wrote letters of introduction to the Comte de Morville, secretary of state, and Monsieur de Maisons, ‘both desirous and worthy of yr acquaintance’. Voltaire was an admirer of Swift’s work and in 1728 he wrote ‘the more I read your works, the more I am ashamed of mine’. (The correspondence of Jonathan Swift edited by Harold Williams)La Henriade title page (click to enlarge)In December 1727 Voltaire had written to Swift requesting him to encourage Irish readers to subscribe to the forthcoming publication, ‘can I make bold to intreat you to make some use of yr interest in Ireland about some subscriptions for the henriade, which is almost ready and does not come out yet for want of little help the subscriptions will be but one guinea in hand’. This was an expensive purchase, but many Irish subscriptions were gathered by Swift. By March 1728 La Henriade was published, Swift is listed as a subscriber to the book as is George Berkeley, William Congreve, Lord Carteret, the Lord Lieutenant, and many of the nobility and gentry of Great Britain and Ireland. Swift was well able to read French and some of his correspondence is in French. He spoke in French with the Huguenot clergy who ministered from the Lady Chapel in St Patrick’s Cathedral.List of subscribers to La Henriade including Rev. Dean Swift (click to enlarge)When Swift’s library was sold after his death in 1745 La Henriade is among his collection, as well as Voltaire’s An essay upon the civil wars of France, translated into English and published in Dublin in 1728, and The history of Charles XII, King of Sweden, published in London in 1732.An Essay upon the Civil Wars of France by Voltaire (click to enlarge) The Swift and Dublin exhibition will run in the Dublin Room at Dublin City Library and Archive, Pearse Street until 25 February 2017.See Also:Jonathan's Swift's gardenJonathan Swift's LibraryJonathan Swift: freeman of DublinThe Swift and Dublin exhibition will run in the Dublin Room at Dublin City Library and Archive, Pearse Street until 25 February 2017.

It’s never too early to introduce your child to a love of books. Dublin City Libraries holds a vast array of books suitable for all ages, even newborns!

It’s never too early to introduce your child to a love of books. Dublin City Libraries holds a vast array of books suitable for all ages, even newborns!

In the winter of 1729 – 1730 Jonathan Swift, Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, was awarded the freedom of Dublin city by special grace. This was the highest honour the city could bestow on him.

The area around the mouth of the River Liffey was inhabited from at least Neolithic times by farmers and fishermen. The great arc of Dublin Bay offered an inviting harbour for sea-going vessels, although its sand banks, shallows, slob lands and treacherous currents proved an obstacle to larger shipping in reaching safe anchorage upriver. This image gallery explores the course Liffey as it runs through the city.

November's Manuscript of the Month is a letter from the Western Front celebrating Robert Downie, “a Victoria Cross Hero”, 1916. The letter is part of the Monica Roberts Collection, one of the most important World War 1 collections of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers Association and Archive held at Dublin City Library and Archive.

The Orchestra of St Cecilia Collection includes concert programmes, posters, flyers, correspondence, programme notes, recordings, soloists and conductor’ biographies and administrative documents. Access to the collection provides unparalleled insight into the processes involved in professional orchestra and event management from the turn of the twenty-first century through recession times in Dublin. Find out more and view some items from the Orchestra of St Cecilia Collection...Dublin City Library and Archive.

Listen to Liz D’Arcy talk about conserving the Wide Street Commission Maps. Hear how she painstakingly removed sellotape, cleaned, repaired and strengthened these important maps.   Liz D'Arcy, Paperworks, Studio for Paper Conservation is qualified with an MA in Conservation of Fine Art on Paper. Liz is an accredited member of the 'Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic works in Ireland' (I.C.H.A.W.I) and a member of the 'Irish Professional Conservators and Restorers Association' (I.P.C.R.A).Between 1757- 1851, the Wide Street Commission had a major impact on the development of the city, transforming it from a medieval city to the Dublin we know today.  Its function was to provide “Wide and Convenient Streets” for Dublin and it had extensive powers to acquire property by compulsory purchase, develop new streets, demolish buildings and impose design standards on building lots which were sold to developers. Dublin City Archives hold the Wide Street Commission Archives, which comprises maps, minute books and drawings. www.dublincityarchives.ieRead more about the conservation project and view Wide Street Commission map collection image gallery.Search and browse the Archive of the Wide Street Commission Maps online.Conserving Wide Street Commission Maps - TranscriptAudio only:Recorded at Dublin City Hall on 24 August 2016 at Dublin City Archives' 'Living in Georgian Dublin' seminar. Part of Heritage Week 2016 programme.Dublin City Archives is grateful to the Heritage Council of Ireland for funding under the Heritage Management Project Scheme 2016 to conserve 23 Wide Street Commission Maps in 2016. Conservation NoticeIn order to reduce handling damage and to ensure the long term preservation of these fragile maps, all researchers are requested to view the digitised images in the first instance. High-Res versions can be provided on request. Viewing of original maps is strictly by appointment only: please apply to [email protected]. Please note: A minimum of 3 days notice is required to process your request and a maximum of 10 maps may be ordered per visit. 

The following is a transcript of Conserving Wide Street Commission Maps 1757-1849, a talk by Liz D'Arcy.AudioWelcome to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. In this episode, Liz D’Arcy talks about conserving the Wide Street Commission Maps. Between 1757 and 1851, the Wide Street Commission had a major impact on the development of Dublin, transforming it from a medieval city to the Dublin we know today. Dublin City Archives hold the Wide Street Commission Archives, comprising maps, minute books and architectural drawings. Recorded in front of a live audience at Dublin City Hall on 24 August 2016 as part of the Dublin City Archives' Heritage Week programme.Ellen MurphyLadies and Gentleman, our next speaker is Liz Darcy and Liz is a very talented paper conservator with an MA in Conservation and fine art in paper and she runs her own company Paperwork Studios.  She is an accredited member of the Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works in Ireland and a member of the Irish Professional Conservators and Restoration Association.  She has worked on numerous heritage projects for a variety of different institutions – including Dublin City Archives and her talk today is going to provide an insight into the intricate work involved with the conservation of Wide Street Commission Maps.  Thank you.Liz DarcyThanks for that introduction.  I don’t really need to say anything else about myself. I think you’ve covered it all (laughs).  Just to say, as a paper conservator I specialise in ... well it’s self explanatory but only paper objects.  So my aim is to conserve and preserve anything paper based.  It’s not officially restoration because I’m not trying to make them look brand new, I’m just trying to stabilise them and preserve them.  So I work on anything from maps, like you’ll hear today, archives, documents, water colours, prints, drawings, to three dimensional card models.  I had the privilege last year of working on one of the original Proclamations which is actually in the exhibition downstairs here as well.  So it’s a varied job and I absolutely love it.So the maps that I’m speaking of today I’ve been conserving a selection of these maps almost every year for I would say maybe nearly ten years and they are the Wide Street Commission plans, all dated from 1757 to 1849, and I would take a selection of these maps per year.  I’ll show you the condition that they come to me in in a few minutes.  I conserve them, then they go back to Dublin City Archives and are placed in secure storage there.  They are also digitised so people can view them.What I’m going to do today is talk about six maps that I’ve very recently treated and they are in very, very poor condition.  Now these are part of another selection of maps but these are probably in the worst condition.  When they come to me they are all rolled up.  They’ve been rolled for years.  You know the oldest I think is 260 years old.So this is an example of how they arrive to me.  So really you can see from the image, if somebody wanted to come in and view that map it really couldn’t be touched.  It couldn’t be opened.  The thing about paper when it’s been rolled for a long time is it wants to stay rolled.  It’s called paper memory.  So even as you try to unroll it, it tends to roll back in and any tears that are present are going to tear further.So this is just before it was treated and it was just very, very gently unrolled for the photograph and it’s held down with weights there and it’s a good example of how they come to me to be treated.So as you can see this map, this is actually of Gloucester Street.  There’s no date on the map but it’s within that time period specified.  It’s extremely discoloured.  Has a lot of surface dirt.  The bottom two sections on the bottom left are actually separated completely from the map, I’ve just placed them beside each other for the photograph.  It’s very, very torn and there are some sections missing which over the years is bound to happen because they are very fragile, they’re being unrolled and rolled and handled and this damage is going to occur to a lot of these maps over the years as they are being used.  So the treatment is very similar to all the maps but it’s cleaned and in this image I have cleaned the left hand side and the right hand side hasn’t been cleaned yet.  So it just shows a good example of the difference between once I start cleaning and it starts to become clear what’s actually underneath all that dirt and it’s a nice process to go through.  It’s a nice process to start with because it’s very visual and you can see the maps cleaning up.  It’s obviously a very delicate process.  The maps are mainly pen and ink and body colour so a lot of those pigments would be sensitive to any kind of treatment or moisture.  In actual fact a lot of the colours have remained really strong on the maps and probably because they have been rolled so they haven’t been exposed to light too much so it’s lovely to see the colours actually brighten up under that dirt as you’re cleaning.So as you can see the cleaning process has started there.  Cleaning basically consists of very small pieces of white eraser and sometimes I would use a smoke sponge which is like a chemical sponge just to very gently lift the dirt off the surface and once all that dry cleaning has been done I then use damp cotton swabs and just swab the surface – I’ll have a few photos of that later – to lift off any kind of soluble dirt.  A lot of objects that I treat I can actually wash in a very large sink I have in my studio which surprises a lot of people but it’s very similar to kind of washing your clothes, the dirt washes out and I check everything beforehand, check nothing is soluble.  A lot of times the pigments don’t wash out and the soluble dirt washes out but these are actually very, very sensitive to moisture so the furthest I can go with wet treatment is just to swab them with cotton swabs and that just very gently lifts the dirt off and actually in this photo this has just been dry cleaned so it hasn’t been swabbed yet so it will actually clean up a little bit more.This is an image of the tear repairs treatment to this map and I suppose a lot of you will have come across archives and documents that have been repaired with Sellotape which is really damaging to paper.  So what I use, what paper conservators use mostly, is Japanese paper to sit over the tears and that is adhered with wheat starch paste which I make up fresh before each treatment and this method is very complementary to paper. I try and pick a Japanese paper of similar weight to the original paper and it has very long fibre so it bonds really nicely and repairs the tears, helps them sit back together, and it’s also, most importantly, all reversible and it doesn’t age badly.  There is no damage going to occur to the paper as it ages as these tear repairs are on the reverse of the paper.So that’s a small corner of tear repairs on the reverse of the map and this is the reverse of the map and all the tear repairs that were done.  You can see on the right hand corner there’s kind of larger pieces, larger strips, of Japanese paper and that was to reattach those two sections that had become separate from the map, so slightly larger just to hold them all together.  And, on the right hand side, I don’ t know if you can see, the large piece of white paper is an infill, sorry there are two pieces of white Japanese paper, so these were the sections that were missing. So what I’ve done is placed a piece of Japanese paper on the reverse, then turned it around and basically trimmed some more Japanese paper to fit exactly into the space that was missing and this makes it much, much stronger.  So there is no danger, if someone picks that map up, of tears going any further in these areas of loss.And then this is the after photo, so this is after treatment, and it’s placed then into a Mylar sleeve.  So this looks like a plastic ... like a poly pocket as such ... it’s actually inert polyester and it actually helps preserve the paper so when they are stored in Dublin City Archives, in their strong room, they are all placed in these Mylar sleeves.  So you can see through the Mylar sleeve to see what’s in it but also the map can be picked up by using the Mylar sleeve so it’s not being handled directly.  So if someone did actually want to see the actual map rather than the digitised image it can be handled without touching it, you can turn it around, see the reverse, see the front and there’s nothing in these sleeves, in these Mylar sleeves, that will cause any damage to paper.  In the normal plastic sleeves there are gases and acids that actually migrate from the sleeves into the paper and will cause them to degrade over time whereas this will actually help preserve it.  So it looks identical to plastic but it’s not, it actually helps preserve it.And then just to sum up, this is the before treatment and then the after treatment in one image.  So you can actually see the bottom left, the two pieces that were separate are still slightly darker than the rest of the map.  They were both cleaned to the same extent but because they were exposed to the air because they were looser they had slightly more ingrained dirt in them.  And also you can see the areas that have been infilled, the areas that were lost.  I’ve left them a neutral off-white colour because again it’s conservation as opposed to restoration, so I’m not trying to hide any areas that were previously lost, you know not trying to make it look new, it’s basically to stabilise it all so that it can be handled and viewed and it’s back in a strong stable condition.  It’s also been pressed after it’s been cleaned and repaired and infilled.  It’s pressed which flattens it out and it can be left pressing for several weeks, if necessary, which removes that memory in the paper of it wanting to roll back up so then it can be stored flat and viewed.  So that was the first map that I treated.The second of six, just in this section, again this is how it came into me, this is before treatment.  So the top is as it was rolled up.  It had been stored rolled up for a long time and this map is of the area of Trinity College and College Green and it’s dated 1784 and there was an inscription on the map "Surveyed by Thomas Sherrard, 1784".  Also on the right hand side, on the front of the map, if you can see in the image, it had a list of each property and who lived in the property.  So very, very useful for researchers I’m sure who are researching this time period and the properties.This is a good example on the image of the reverse, on the lower right you can see someone had attached Sellotape to this map.  Now, it is damaging to paper but at the same time it kept the pieces together so you know they stayed together and then could be treated by me at a later stage, so that was one benefit but if the Sellotape had stayed on the paper it actually can cause it to degrade over time and can cause more damage to the paper bonds and the paper then just becomes more fragile in that area.  Also, as you’ve probably seen in old pieces of Sellotape, on old documents, it discolours very badly and it becomes a very orange/brown colour on paper and that becomes ingrained in the paper and it’s really, really difficult, almost impossible, to remove that staining.  So just a word of warning which you probably all know already, don’t use Sellotape on anything important.So the treatment of this map; this is the swabbing, damp swabbing, and you can just see the dirt that’s come off the map onto that cotton swab.  It’s not a very nice picture but necessary.  So before the swabbing this again was dry cleaned, surface cleaned, with various types of erasers and sponges to remove the surface dirt from the surface of the paper.  After that it was treated with water and damp cotton swabs to lift off the remaining soluble dirt on the paper and then tear repairs – this is the reverse of the paper – and you can again see the Japanese paper tear repairs that have all been cut or torn to size to fit over the tears exactly and the damaged section on the right hand side of this image has slightly thicker Japanese paper just to hold it all together.  And then this is the before and after.  In the before picture, which I forgot to mention actually, you can see the right hand side of the map has very, very heavy surface dirt and again that was the end that was exposed when it was rolled up, so that tended to get dirtier than the rest.  The rest was slightly protected by the fact that it was rolled.  But the very, very heavy ingrained dirt all settles on the exposed piece which was on right hand side.  So it cleaned up really nicely.  I think particularly the lower part of the image where you couldn’t really see the streets as well have cleaned up so it can be viewed and examined.  The areas that were missing have been infilled, tears repaired and again this was pressed and it then went into the Mylar sleeve for storage in Dublin City Archives and would be photographed as well so it could be viewed digitally.  So that was the second map.This is the third map that I treated.  So the one advantage of this map, if you could call it that, was it didn’t have as much surface dirt as the previous maps but you can see it was very, very badly torn – really, really fragile.  Even unrolling it to view it, when I first picked them up, was very difficult.  This is a map of Townsend Street from 1802.  An inscription on the reverse read ‘Fleet Market, year 1802’ as a description of the map and also on this map, on the right hand side you can see on the image of the front was a list of the properties and their prices so again probably very valuable to someone researching this area.  But as it was before treatment it couldn’t be handled at all.  In fact, the tears running into the centre, if they tore any further it would have been in even more separate sections than it was already.  The image of the front on the lower left, you can see the top left and the left side, both sections had separated completely.  They were separate from the main piece of the map and, as you can see, there are a huge amount of large tears running into the centre of the map – so very, very fragile.  So again this was very gently relaxed out so I could get to work on it and then it was surface cleaned on the front and the reverse using different techniques, so all the surface dirt was removed, apart from the very ingrained dirt, and then the tears were repaired – similar to the previous maps.  These tears were quite extensive so I did some work on the lightbox for some of this map and the lightbox really just allows me to see through the map, so if tears on a piece of paper are very old they tend to not line up very well together so to ensure that I was lining up every line or inscription or drawing on the map the lightbox allows me to see through it and I can very gently line everything up to the way that it should be and the picture on the right is the wheat starch paste that I make up to use as an adhesive with the Japanese paper.  A lot of techniques in paper conservation come from Japan because that’s where it originated so you’ve heard me talk about Japanese paper, the wheat starch paste is Japanese, the brushes I use are Japanese.  They really are the masters of paper conservation so conservators in the rest of the world would tend to follow their techniques, you know they are absolute perfectionists so great conservators to follow.  So that was the tear repairs, letting them settle.Again, another image of tear repairs drying.  So the picture on the left is because some of these tears are so long and they’ve been torn for so long as well they needed to pressed gently so they have been repaired on the reverse and then these weights are placed on top of them just to ensure that they flatten down nicely and line up together nicely and then the image on the right is all the tear repairs and the infills on the reverse of this map.  You can see the Japanese paper extends out beyond the original border of the map, so this is very much during treatment.  These repairs are then trimmed at the edges but just to ensure it is only the Japanese paper that’s trimmed, it’s never the original paper of the map (laughter).  You know we keep every single ... as you can see from that image on the left hand side, that’s before it has been trimmed, every small little piece that’s sticking out is kept just to ensure I am keeping every original section of the map.  So the Japanese paper is then trimmed at the edges and then each map is pressed, as I’ve mentioned previously, and another Japanese technique is used for this.  We use a dahlia sprayer which is just a very, very light mist.  We mist and humidify the paper and just let it very gently relax out then it’s placed between boards and weights are placed on top of it and it can press anything from a day to a few weeks just to flatten it all out nicely and, as I mentioned, remove that paper memory so it doesn’t want to roll back up.  So this is the before and after images and you can see where it’s been infilled.  Again, I haven’t tried to hide these areas but it’s all back in a stable condition.  All the tears have been repaired.  It’s back as one piece and again any treatments that were used will help preserve it.  None of these treatments will actually damage the paper, so then it went back to Dublin City Archives in this condition.The next one is a map of Fleet Street and Bank of Ireland.  No I don’t have any exact date on this one but this is as it was before treatment.  This one, unlike the previous ones, has very bad mould damage so at some stage this had come in contact with moisture and a damp atmosphere and it had a lot of mould on it.  So I don’t know if you can see, there’s kind of dark spots running across the lower centre, these are all mould spots, so if this had been left without treatment the mould can eventually just eat into the pigments and the paper and can cause literally holes to occur in the paper.  It literally eats right through it so it was very important, as well as cleaning and repairing, to remove all the mould spores from this map.  So it was surface cleaned very, very gently because it was very soft because of the moisture damage so the surface of this map was a lot softer than the previous maps, as with them all, but a little bit extra, I had to treat it very, very gently when surface cleaning to ensure that I wasn’t removing any of the pigments or affecting the surface of the paper.  So it was very gently surface cleaned and then once I’d ensured it was cleaned and all the mould had been removed it was, again, repaired with Japanese paper.  The areas of loss were infilled.  So this is an image of the front and the reverse during the tear repair and infill treatment and then this is it after treatment.  Again, it was pressed once it had been cleaned and repaired and stabilised.  So you can see the difference between before and after, that it’s nice and flat.  You can still see the staining that was left, that was caused by the mould damage, that was ingrained right through from front to back of the paper, so I went as far as I could with treatment but obviously I don’t want to damage the paper at all but most importantly all the mould spores were completely removed and the fact that this was going back into a dry stable environment where the temperature is being monitored would help ensure that no other mould spores were going to grow and no further damage was going to occur.  The paper was still quite soft so it still has to be handled very carefully.  But, again, it was placed in a Mylar sleeve so it doesn’t need to be touched or handled directly.  It would be protected in the Mylar sleeve in Dublin City Archives when people need to view it.And this is a fifth map that I treated in this section and this is Hawkins Street, Townsend Street, from 1800.  Again, this is by Thomas Sherrard.  The inscription on the lower right, on the front ‘by Thomas Sherrard, 1800’ and this slightly differed from the others in that it was paper attached to canvas with edge tapes around it and you can see the reverse was extremely dirty – very, very heavy surface dirt.  And again, much heavier surface dirt in the section that was rolled to the outside and was exposed to the air.  So the thing about canvas backings is that they attract a huge amount of dirt to the paper because of the open structure of the canvas, so it’s usually unless it’s of inherent importance to the paper it’s usually removed as a way of getting to the back and then the backing is replaced with a paper backing which doesn’t attract as much dirt and the edge tapes were removed.  In fact, they were almost falling off it anyway, they had all become loose as well.  And another interesting thing about this is you can see hopefully the holes in it, this wasn’t insect damage, it just seems it was poor handling at some stage.  I don’t know what was done to it but all these large holes running through it occurred at some stage or other during its lifetime, so these were causing it to be generally weak as well – the structure of the paper wasn’t as strong because of these holes.  So again this was surface cleaned and this is just an image of during treatment, so the right hand side has been cleaned.  The left hand side still has the surface dirt on it, so you can see that it was cleaning up nicely and it cleaned up very well.  So the top images are the before treatment and the bottom images are the after treatment.  So one aspect of the canvas backing was it had one inscription on it, so I cleaned that and kept it so it’s stored with the map, the inscription reads ‘Dublin Society Maps, 140 Fleet Market, year ...’ – the year has degraded off it so the  year is not on it but we know it’s 1800.  So that inscription from the canvas is retained with the map and in actual fact the original canvas backing was handed back to Ellen in the Archives in case they wanted to keep it with the original map and the edge tapes were also handed back.  So again this was cleaned, repaired, the holes were infilled which you can see from the image on the left – they are slightly lighter than the original paper.  It was pressed to flatten it and it was lined with a full sheet of Japanese paper, so this replaces the canvass that was on it and it’s a nice clean way of strengthening the paper as opposed to the original canvas.  So it was handed back in a nice clean re-lined condition.The final map which I’ll speak about is ... this is quite a long map.  It was 900mm – 90cm long and this is of Sackville, Gardiner, Temple Street, Summerhill area and an inscription on the reverse read ‘Summerhill’.  This was quite unusual in that it consisted of layers of paper attached to together.  There is maybe 3-4 layers of paper and I’m presuming this was done originally but it’s quite hard to tell.  So I didn’t want to remove any of the layers but a lot of them were delaminating and sections were missing.  So once it had been cleaned, which again was quite a tough job because it was very, very heavy surface dirt and this is an image of the cleaning.  So the top left is a cleaning test patch, so this is me initially just cleaning to see how much dirt is going to come off and you could actually see through the grey dirt a nice green and red colour coming through so I knew it would clean up quite nicely.  The bottom image is the reverse of the map and this is the second cleaning process which is swabbing with damp swabs where I just place a piece of blotter beneath the sections, swab it, and you can see the dirt that’s come off onto the blotter and the swab and the blotter underneath the map.  I was just very, very soluble dirt coming off this map so it was quite a long process to remove all the dirt from this map and then, as I said, there were layers of paper so I wanted to re-attach all those layers back together so it was a matter of lifting some sections that were loose and pasting with wheat starch paste through the layers from front to back before then executing the tear repairs which you can see on the reverse in this image and also one area of infill to strengthen up the map.  I didn’t infill the pieces that are missing at the top and bottom edge because the paper was very, very heavy and there was nothing to attach the infill to so I left them as they were.  So again, this is the before and after images.  So you can see how heavy that surface dirt was on that map.  It was really discoloured – very, very hard to see and it cleaned up very, very nicely.  I would have liked to have gotten it cleaner but that was as far as I could go with the treatment but, again, all the images are visible, all the inscriptions are visible, so it could be examined.  As with the other maps, it was also pressed to flatten it and then placed in the Mylar sleeve for storage and they all were obviously stored flat as opposed to rolled so that no further damage would occur.  So that’s the final map I’m going to talk about.Just as a little segueway, something which made this job a little bit more exciting was that the RTÉ show Nationwide contacted me to ask could they film me working, whatever project I had coming up or something I found interesting, so I suggested this project and contacted Ellen and Mary in the Archive and checked it was okay with them and they very kindly agreed that Nationwide could film the process of the conservation of these maps.  So it was a little bit of added pressure but (laughter) it was also exciting I suppose to work along the way and Ellen was brilliant, she filmed with me when I was picking the maps up and dropping them off and did some interviews.  You can see her in the top right corner there.  And they also came out to the studio during the process and filmed me working on some of the maps as well so that made it more exciting even though I thoroughly enjoy working on them anyway but it was a little bit added extra.So that’s basically the process from start to finish.  You know, as I said, I work on several of these most years and it’s a job I really enjoy doing, particularly I think being originally from Dublin, living in Wicklow now also.  But being originally from Dublin it’s interesting to see the maps and how the streets were planned and it’s interesting or it’s a privilege I suppose to be able to help make them stable and secure and accessible as well.  So I will leave it at that, thanks for listening. (Applause) Thank-you for listening to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. To hear more, please subscribe on iTunes or SoundCloud. You can also visit our website - dublincitypubliclibraries.ie and follow us on Twitter and Facebook.