The National Photographic Archive has been located in Meeting House Square, in Dublin's Temple Bar, for two years now, but many people have yet to venture in. Passers-by peer in, but few enter.
Grainne MacLochlainn, curator of the archive, is aware of the problem. "We would be extremely happy to see numbers going up," she says, "it always takes a little bit of time to get known in a place." The summer months give the best crop of curious pedestrians, she says: strollers catch a glimpse of the exhibition space within, framed by the building's red walls.
Among the reasons the archive moved into these premises in October 1998 was to improve public access, as well as to give its photographic collections space to expand. Until then, the archive had been housed with other material in the main building of the National Library, which meant the photographic collections lost their emphasis. Its new home was intended to give the archive its own strengthened identity.
The archive is made up of some 90 collections, the biggest is the Poole collection and the most famous is the Lawrence. Based on material that has been bought by or donated to the National Library over the years, it is expanding all the time.
"There are 300,000 photographs in all. The collection would generally be divided into the glass plate and negatives collections, which are the largest. We have about 250,000 glass plates and negatives dating from the 1870s onwards. They're the big commercial collections, like the Lawrence, which were acquired by the National Library over the years. Then you would have other photographic albums and the loose print collections from all sorts of sources. People still donate photographic material to us."
The archival holdings are kept in two specially-designed underground storage rooms. They are fireproof, temperature-controlled, dark and dry, to keep deterioration of the images to a minimum.
Although this is primarily an archive, it was designed to maximise public access and it is possible to walk in off the street and view images immediately in the archive's reading room. About 5,000 images have been scanned from the archive for viewing, and many more can be seen on microfilm: the entire Lawrence Collection, for example, which consists of 40,000 images. There are indexes and catalogues to work from, with many of the photographs catalogued by the photograph's subject, time and place. The public can order prints of any image in the holdings.
"Just give us a shout beforehand," says MacLochlainn. "If you're just coming in to look around there's no problem. But if you're looking for a certain album or set of prints that we would need to bring up from the archive below, then we need prior warning."
The exhibition space, which mounts four or five exhibitions a year, presents photographs of general interest. Currently on view is the second in the "Trainspotting" series of exhibitions, which presents images from the heyday of the Irish national railways.
Based on the O'Dea collection, the exhibition looks at the period from 1938 to 1977: the decline of the great national railway network.
Photographers such as James P. O'Dea recorded such aspects of the national life, and went to the bother of cataloguing and recording the details of their subjects. Only such individual enthusiasts can give us a visual record of whole sections of our history.
"Trainspotting" is at the National Photographic Archive exhibition space until July 8th