Core duties

In March the National Library provided public access to a large number of Finnish cultural and recreational magazines from 1810 to 1944. Magazines published before 1870 and no longer under copyright were made freely available online.

Collections and customers

The National Library used approximately 790,000 euros in the purchase of research literature in 2010. The scientific collection expanded in line with objectives, although more electronic material was acquired than was originally envisaged. Printed research literature accounted for approximately 50 per cent of the acquisitions.

The use of electronic library services increased further, which had an expected impact on the use of on-site services. However, as many as half of borrowed items were from closed stacks and one-fourth from outside the computer lending system.

The utilisation rate of the National Library’s digitised collections service, including digitised newspapers and periodicals as well as ephemera, showed no change from the previous year: page views remained stable at 6.5 million.

A total of 173,000 customers, some 3,000 fewer than in 2009, visited the Unioninkatu facilities. More than 50 per cent of the customers were again University of Helsinki students, researchers or other staff.

According to the annual customer survey, the users of the National Library remained highly satisfied with the services offered to them. As in previous years, the overall rating bordered on excellent (8.8 on a scale of 0–10).

Legal deposit activities

A total of 155,000 legal deposits were received and organised into the collections, accounting for 421 metres of shelf space.  Counted in copies, ephemera continued to dominate.

Some 200 million files (150 million in 2009) were harvested for the Finnish Web Archive. To obtain material not reached through harvesting, publishers were contacted actively for the first time. Deposit requests related especially to online music.

Identifiers, descriptors and thesauri

New printed and electronic legal deposits were described and catalogued in Fennica, the National Bibliography of Finland, as printing houses and publishers submitted the deposits.

In 2010 two important SFS standards were completed: the International Standard Text Code (ISTC) and the Finnish translation of the Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS) standard.

Some 1,000 new index terms were again added to the General Finnish Thesaurus (YSA). The Swedish-language Allärs thesaurus, which the Åbo Akademi University maintains for the National Library, expanded at a similar pace.

Digitisation and preservation

The Centre for Preservation and Digitisation again reached better than ordinary results thanks to both fixed-term staff hired on funds from a stimulus project and a two-shift system: production involved the scanning of 1.3 million pages and the post-processing of 1.2 million pages. A total of 1.1 million pages were made available to customers. In addition, more than 2,000 cassettes (Compact Cassettes) of both music and speech were digitised.

Throughout the year, preparations for the Comellus project were conducted. The purpose of the project is to develop a production process and model for the electronic deposit and archiving of newspapers.  The chief funder of this three-year project is the European Social Fund (ESF), and practical partners include Etelä-Savon Viestintä Oy/Länsi-Savo, Esan Kirjapaino Oy/Etelä-Suomen Sanomat
as well as the partner network of Digitalmikkeli.

Old newspapers and periodicals as well as the legal deposits of regularly published newspapers were microfilmed in somewhat greater numbers than in the previous year.

Library services

In March-April the National Library carried out a national library survey, which reached a record number of library service users: a total of 34,300 customers.

As a whole, library services were deemed fairly successful and slightly better than before. The importance of library services on a scale of 1–5 was now rated at 4.6–4.7, whereas the figure lay somewhere between 4.4 and 4.6 in the survey conducted two years ago.

Compared to the previous year, a considerably larger number of articles were now downloaded from FinELib, the Finnish National Electronic Library, which serves the entire Finnish library sector. The number of searches conducted in FinELib collections also continued to multiply.

A total of 5.6 million searches were conducted in the national databases. The substantial (17 per cent) increase is largely explained by the provision of free public access to the Linda and Arto databases.  The use of Fennica also increased by
7 per cent, while that of Viola, the National Discography of Finland, somewhat decreased.

The University of Lapland, the Society of Swedish Literature in Finland and the National Institute for Health and Welfare joined the Doria publication repository of Finnish institutions of higher education as new clients.

 

The July 1927 issue of Aitta is one of the digitised periodicals from 1810 to 1944.

Digitisation: National Library of Finland