The Rocque road to Dublin

The digitised files available via the Irish Virtual ResearchLibrary and Archive (IVRLA) will support research but also allow aunique level of access to the material that would not otherwise beavailable.

"It goes back to the issue of added value," states IVRLA projectmanager, John McDonough. "It allows the user to do things with thematerial that you couldn't do with the original."

As example he cites a map that will become available over theArchive, John Rocque's Map of Dublin. The French royal cartographerproduced the map in 1756 and Bernard Scale updated it in 1773. Itwas one of a series that included highly detailed maps of London,Rome and Paris.

Each of these cities were surveyed and then drawn in the onescale so that differences in size would immediately become apparent,says McDonough. UCD has one of a number of copies of the Dublin mapin its collection.

"It was one of the most detailed maps done of the city. It isvery, very detailed and there are illustrations of buildings such asCollins Barracks. You can actually see how small Dublin was in the18th century."

For example a great deal of what is now inner city Dublin wasonly fields in 1773. The map shows existing field boundaries as theywere at the time.

The original map is about 200cm by 280cm and has been scanned ineight sections to improve access to the detail available on the map.

A remote researcher sitting in front of a browser will now beable to study this map in very fine detail using free software thatcan be uploaded from the IVRLA. "It is known as Djvu, an image fileformat technology," says McDonough.

The software provides a range of features for studying the mapand other archived documents. The user can zoom in or pan across thedocument, use an in-built optical character reader to copy textstraight into a document or search for a word or phrase.

It has a built in ruler so that text or images can be measuredand there are other viewing options.

"It is a highly compressed file so it is easy to transmit overthe internet, even over dial-up lines," he explains. "Thisfacilitates the whole research agenda. It enables more interactionwith the scanned document."

There are other important period maps in the UCD collection, forexample Fraser's map of Dublin completed in 1860. This shows viewsof the city's growing suburbs.

These same capabilities will become available for all of thedocuments and images retained in the archive.

It will provide a new level of research capability, he believes.