One of my best moments at the University of Helsinki is connected with the finalisation of the publication project The A. E. Nordenskiöld Collection. Annotated Catalogue of Maps made up to 1800 (1995). The publication project had already continued for about twenty years when I was appointed editor in chief for this project cataloguing the important A. E. Nordenskiöld map collection. My task was to work on the fifth and last volume. This part of the catalogue and thereby the publication project in its entirety were completed in 1995. The finalisation of this large-scale, five-part academic cataloguing of the Nordenskiöld map collection and the compiling of the fifth part led to the approval of the collection as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

As editor-in-chief, before me was, among other things, the task of creating a geographical reference work. The task was not easy and expertise in the subject was not found in Finland. Nevertheless, I received crucially important ideas during the planning stage of the project from the Tony Campbell, Map Librarian of the British Library. Work in discovering local place names demanded wide-ranging research, and this took me to the Bibliothèque nationale de France, in Paris, and in London to both the Map Division of the British Library and the Royal Geographical Society, where I was able to clarify thousands of unclear place names beginning from the 15th century. Just clarifying the names in the work Isolario by Bartolomeo da li Sonetti on the islands of the Aegean took a whole month. The collection contains around 24 000 maps from the 15th century onwards, and I went through them all. My office was in what is now the University’s administration building, opposite Porthania, and the Nordenskiöld collection was housed in the basement floor of the same building.

Upon completion in 1995, the geographical reference work was one of the first systematic, region-based reference works of historical maps. The unique nature of the Nordenskiöld collection and the depth and systematic nature of the reference work led to its approval as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1997.

That is also a good memory, but the best memory connected to this project was the first printing of the finished work on a primitive printer. I had sat in my office on numerous occasions with the IT support person, creating suitable printing programs, but I had only printed parts of the work prior to this. With the entire map data finally entered it was time to print the whole work. When I pressed the button I was 100 percent certain that I wouldn’t succeed in printing the whole thing. Either there would be a program error or the printer would malfunction. I sat next to the printer as it spat out sheathes of paper, which formed a pile on the floor. The printer worked into the evening and over the night until it suddenly stopped. I was surprised to see thousands of pages neatly stacked in a half-metre pile on the floor. The whole work had been printed.

After that it was time to celebrate and also time to move on to other tasks and the completion of my PhD. The work described above demanded far more work, insight and determination from a young master’s graduate and mother of small children than a doctoral dissertation ever would.

• The A. E. Nordenskiöld Collection, Memory of the World UNESCO