Researchers, students

Reprographic service

What materials can I copy myself and what not?

You may copy materials available for home loans and in the Reference Library. According to the law, you may make copies of published materials for private use also in the case that the copyright of the work is still valid. 

Self-copying of the following materials is not allowed due to reasons related to ensuring their preservation, but you can order reproductions of them from the Reprographic Service.

Research cooperation

We participate in research projects that promote the availability and usability of our materials as well as improve the quality of our materials with, for example, new types of content data or by utilising applications based on artificial intelligence.

Researcher facilities

Researchers and university students can apply for designated facilities in the National Library for long-term and intensive work via an application.

The facilities can be applied twice a year, in October-November and May-June. Customers are informed about the application period on the web site and in the Library.

Self-service library

Self-service hours at the National Library

  • Mon, Tue, Thu and Fri 9–10 am and 5–6 pm
  • Wed 9–10 am

There is no customer service during self-service hours, and the Special Collections Reading Room is not open.

(Customer service is open Mon, Tue, Thu and Fri 10 am – 5 pm, Wed 10 am – 8 pm. See Opening hours.)

During self-service hours you can

Skosmos

Skosmos is an open source code thesaurus and ontology browser application operating on the background of the Finto service developed in the National Library of Finland. Skosmos development takes place on Github platform and is open to public viewing and commenting.  Skosmos user interface is available in dozens of languages and language versions are regularly updated as a part of each release version.  In addition to the Finto service, Skosmos has also been taken to use elsewhere, even abroad (e.g. UNESCO and FAO use Skosmos).

Viola – the Finnish national discography

Viola is the Finnish national discography and the national bibliography of sheet music. The database contains references on Finnish sound recordings since 1901 and Finnish sheet music since 1977. Viola database contains information both on musical publications as well as single works and pieces. In all, Viola contains approximately 1.1 million cataloguing records. Approximately 20,000 new records are added each year to the database. 

YSO General Finnish Ontology

The General Finnish Ontology YSO is a trilingual (Finnish, Swedish, English) ontology consisting mainly of general concepts, but which also contains a large number of concepts specific to various fields. YSO's Swedish language version is ALLFO.

Ontology refers to a hierarchy of concepts, which describes concepts and relations between them in some topic area in a machine understandable format and it identifies the concepts with identifiers (URI) instead of terms.

YSO places

YSO places is a bilingual (Finnish, Swedish) ontology of places, intended for general use. YSO places includes concepts referring to administrative and other areas as well as physical geography, selected to meet the content description needs of memory institutions in particular. The concepts refer to current and historical places in and outside Finland.