Basic tasks

At the end of the year, the National Library’s collections comprised
107 shelf kilometres. The Library digitised a record number of
500,000 pages for free online use and stored 61.3 million public web pages.

Research literature

The acquisition of current research literature focused strongly on the field of history, followed by Russia and Eastern Europe, linguistics and literature.

Legal deposit copies

The new Act on storing and preserving cultural materials took effect at the beginning of the year and resulted in amendments to, among other things, legal deposits. The obligation to deposit reprints was removed from the new Act, leading to a decrease in the number of titles.

The number of legal deposits of ephemera decreased, but the change remained within the limits of normal annual fluctuation. The legal deposits of sound and image recordings, in turn, were up slightly from the previous year.

Excluding electronic material, the National Collection grew by 465 shelf metres, or by approximately 165,000 items, all of which were protected and catalogued for customer use.

Electronic recordings make up a new group of legal deposits. Around 61.5 million files of publicly available electronic material published in Finland were deposited in 2008.

Publications

Supported by the Niilo Helander Foundation, the National Library published a book called Suomea rajan takana 1918–1944, which deals with literature that came out in Finnish in the Soviet Union during the years in question. The book was introduced to the public at the Helsinki Book Fair in October.

The work, published by BTJ Kustannus, is based on the National Library’s Soviet Karelia collection, which is Finland’s most comprehensive source material on Finnish-language Soviet literature.

The bibliographical part of the book was written by Pauli Kruhse, MA, and Antero Uitto, a non-fiction author. The latter also wrote the history review included in the book.

Researcher service

The National Library’s main building, located on Unioninkatu, was visited by 190,500 local customers over the year.

The most active month was May, which saw 23,700 visitors. Information services handled 2,400 individual assignments.

The biggest customer groups consisted of historians, literature researchers and linguists, as well as philosophy and arts researchers. Fifty per cent of local customers and three-fourths of scientific literature borrowers represented the University of Helsinki.

Cooperation with the University’s Faculty of Arts and Faculty of Social Sciences, as well as with Russian and East European Studies continued to be active and fruitful.

Digitised material

The National Library’s digitisation centre in Mikkeli produced over 500,000 pages of newspaper and magazine material for online use.

Newspapers accounted for the biggest single entity of the digitised collections. The Historical Newspaper Library grew with new additions of newspapers published in 1890–1900. Digitised sound recordings consisted of DAT tapes and compact cassettes.

The use of digitised materials increased by as much as 42 per cent from 3.3 million to 4.8 million page searches. Most of the use (85%) targeted the Historical Newspaper Library.

Library network services

National databases continue to grow steadily in size. Their use remained the same, while the use of electronic materials increased.

A total of 11 million articles were downloaded from the full text resources of the FinELib electronic library, which meant a 32 per cent increase over the previous year.

In terms of money, centralised online material (the FinELib resources) accounted for 81 per cent of material acquisitions made by universities and for 58 per cent of the acquisitions made by universities of applied sciences.

Suomea rajan takana, a volume based on the National Library’s unique collection of literature published in Finnish in the Soviet Union, was introduced at the Helsinki Book Fair.

Photo: National Library/Kari Timonen