Metadata and description

Finland’s national ISMN Agency

The Agency maintains a national publisher register and provides information about Finnish publishers for national and international use.

Identifiers as a part of metadata serve the publishing industry and library sector in their entirety and support identification, processing and availability of publications. The identifiers are used, for example, in publishing industry's ordering and distribution systems to speed up the recognition of publications as well as international and domestic joint catalogues, bibliographies, library lending systems and information retrieval.

Finna

Finna is composed of the Finna.fi search service, which brings all the resources together, and hundreds of other individual Finna search services created by museums, libraries and archives. Using versatile search functions, you can easily access millions of items quickly and easily.

Finna includes almost five hundred customer organisations.

Finto

Finto is a thesaurus and ontology service free for all users. Finto contents include e.g. General Finnish Ontology YSO and YSO-places, a Metadata thesaurus, and Kanto - national agent names. Finto also provides several domain ontologies, domain thesauri and classifications as well as the KOKO ontology cloud which links a dozen of Finnish domain ontologies to YSO. The thesauri and ontologies in Finto are published as linked data and contribute to interoperability across language and institutional borders.

Finto AI

Finto AI can be used to suggest subjects for text in Finnish, Swedish and English. It currently gives suggestions based on concepts of the General Finnish Ontology YSO. Finto AI can be used via a web form and it also has an open API for easy integration to other systems. 

ISNI

ISNI, the International Standard Name Identifier, is an identifier given to a public identity of a person or an organisation. The ISNI is useful in distinguishing e.g. two persons with identical names. It also helps to recognise two expressions of a name (e.g. in different writing systems) as referring to the same entity.

The National Library of Finland is one of the Registation Agencies.

For more information please contact us: [email protected].

KOKO ontology

KOKO is a collection of Finnish ontologies, which have been linked to each other by means of mirroring. KOKO’s framework is the General Finnish Upper Ontology (YSO) to which a group of ontologies in special fields have been linked. KOKO contains in all over 50,000 concepts. Other ontologies included in KOKO are:

MARC 21

MARC 21 is an international description and file transfer format, which is maintained and developed by the Library of Congress.  The National Library of Finland edits the Finnish and Swedish versions of the format and provides guidance and training related to them as well as maintains international connections.Provision of conversions between various format versions and updates is also a part of the service.A separate USEMARCON software is available for making and testing conversions.

Melinda

Melinda is a collaborative environment for national cataloguing activities as well as a national metadata repository that is used to collate descriptive metadata on library materials. Participating libraries can use the shared repository to catalogue their materials and thus enable this information to be further utilised. This process helps the libraries decrease their workload and save costs, allowing them to focus on providing their patrons with even better services.

ONIX

ONIX for Books is an international describing and data transfer format for books and other publications maintained by EDItEUR.ONIX centre is responsible for the maintenance and development of the Finnish application together with operators in the book sector.

Reception of digital legal deposit copies

Submitting legal deposit copies of digital publications according to the Act on Collecting and Preserving Cultural Materials (Laki kulttuuriaineistojen tallettamisesta ja säilyttämisestä 1433/2007). Publications may be delivered to the Legal Deposit Office using an online form, or (upon agreement) through an SFTP connection, or in a data storage medium.

The aim of the service is to preserve Finnish digital publications and to make them available for researchers and other users today and in the future.