abevan January 21st, 2010
The Library’s new exhibition, Discover your National Library: Explore, Reflect, Connect provides a unique opportunity for the public to view first-hand a representative selection of the Library’s holdings – the world’s largest and most comprehensive collection of Irish documentary material numbering almost eight million items including maps, prints, drawings, manuscripts, photographs, books, newspapers and periodicals.
Throughout, the exhibition makes extensive use of digital media, with special features including a series of screened talks by the Library’s curators describing the significance or importance of certain exhibition items. One of the most popular features is an interactive table using Microsoft Silverlight technology, which enables the visitor to zoom in on images of objects from the collections which can be seen in amazing detail. Images are tagged in such a way that if the visitor finds an item they are particularly interested in, the technology automatically links them to other similar items likely to be of interest.
Discover your National Library opens at 2-3 Kildare Street, Dublin on 20 January 2010. Admission is free.
Tags: Exhibitions, National Library of Ireland, News & Events
abevan November 12th, 2009
The National Photographic Archive, Dublin hosted an exhibition of twenty images from the National Folklore Collection, University College Dublin for Culture Night in September this year and the exhibition attracted a great deal of interest.
The exhibition is now available (free of charge apart from transport costs) to libraries and other institutes or bodies who may wish to host it.
This photographic exhibition celebrates the contribution of four Swedish scholars and writers to Irish culture in the first half of the twentieth century. Each of them played a significant role in advancing the study of Irish folklore and ethnology and in cultivating Swedish-Irish relations. All four men and women were also capable photographers, and many of the photographs and correspondence with Irish colleagues are now preserved in the National Folklore Collection, University College Dublin.
The black and white images are mounted and framed and an accompanying catalogue was printed in Irish, English and Swedish.
For further deatils please contact the director of the National Folklore Collection, Ríonach uí Ógáin .
Tags: Exhibitions, National Folklore Collection
abevan July 20th, 2009
Beware the Jabberwock! an exhibition of books on the animal kingdom in Marsh’s Library was opened by Dr. Martin Mansergh, T.D., Minister of State, on Tuesday June 30 2009.
The title comes from the nonsense poem about odd creatures in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. There are books by famous 16th and 17th-century writers on natural history, covering exotic birds, butterflies and bees, elephants, horses, cats and tigers, reptiles and sea monsters. The exhibition includes many volumes by the Italian writer Ulisse Aldrovandi, whose magnificent work on natural history is regarded as the greatest zoological compendium of the early 17th century.
Other well known early writers on natural history on display in this exhibition are Thomas Moffett, the Comte de Buffon and Gulielmus Rondelet. Rondelet’s ‘Monkfish’ [illustrated] and ‘Bishopfish’ are both illustrated wearing their full clerical attire! Oliver Goldsmith’s Animated Nature is represented in the first Irish edition, published in Dublin in 1777.
The Exhibition is open to the public during the Library’s normal working
hours: Mon, Wed, Thurs, Fri.: 9.30–1.00 and 2.00–5.00; Sat.
10.00–1.00. (Closed Tues. & Sun.) It will continue until Spring 2010.
Tags: Exhibitions, Marsh's Library
abevan July 3rd, 2009
The Royal Irish Academy’s most recent exhibition features exhibits from the Academy’s rich natural history collections with those of the National Botanic Gardens and the Natural History Museum.
The exhibits are used to tell the story of how Darwin came by his ideas and how Robert Lloyd Praeger and his co-workers on the Clare Island Survey strove to investigate some of the questions at the heart of Darwin’s work, ‘throwing light on the question of island life and the problems of dispersal’.
The findings of the first surveys, together with the work of the modern New Survey of Clare Island (1992–2009), provide unique insights into the increasingly important issues of turnover of species, climate change and loss of habitat.
Venue: Academy House, 19 Dawson Street, Dublin 2.
Monday-Friday 10.00 a.m. – 5.00 p.m. (excluding dates of conferences, please check the website)
The exhibition is accompanied by a series of free lunchtime lectures and associated events.
A new book, also called Darwin, Praeger and the Clare Island Surveys, amplifies the themes of the exhibition through contributions by Peter Bowler, Timothy Collins, Thomas Duddy, Matthew Jebb, Greta Jones, Conleth Manning and Martin Steer.
Tags: Exhibitions, Royal Irish Academy
abevan July 2nd, 2009
If ever you go to Dublin town, an exhibition of evocative photographs by Elinor Wiltshire chronicling Dubliners as they worked, played, shopped and prayed during the 1950s and 1960s, opens at the National Photographic Archive in Temple Bar, Dublin.
Born in Limerick, Elinor Wiltshire (nee O’Brien) founded the Green Studios on St Stephen’s Green, Dublin, with her husband Reginald Wiltshire in the 1950s. Over a period of about fifteen years, using a Rolleiflex camera, Elinor Wiltshire captured images of a changing city and its people.
Her photographs reveal an artist’s eye for the beauty that exists in everyday life; shoppers in Cumberland Street’s busy second-hand market (see photo); summer outings on Sandymount Strand; exuberant scenes of All Ireland Football Finals fans at railway stations; Corpus Christi processions through the city of Dublin.
The exhibition will continue in the National Photographic Archive, Meeting House Sq, Temple Bar, Dublin 2 until October 2009.
Opening Hours: Mon – Fri: 10am – 5pm; Saturday: 10am – 2pm.
Admission is free.
Contact Details: Tel: +35316030378; Email: photoarchive@nli.ie
Photograph courtesy of the NLI
Tags: Exhibitions, National Library of Ireland