The National Library's search service searches for materials at kansalliskirjasto.finna.fi.
The National Library develops its services in order to promote equality in Finland. We work to ensure that our published cultural heritage is available as openly and easily as possible. With digitisation, we aim to provide extensive, harmonised and open materials. We strengthen the interest in and visibility of cultural heritage materials in cooperation with memory institutions and our other partners.
Microfilming services
We distribute microfilm copies of newspapers to the libraries. The National Library of Finland digitalises all newspapers published in Finland and prints them on microfilm (Computer output microfilm).
The durability of a microfilm under the right conditions is at least 500 years. Film can be used in digitalisation.
The Agent Metadata Service provides instructions for the description of persons, families and corporate bodies and their use in the description of resources. This service is provided primarily to libraries participating in the coproduction of agent metadata. The forthcoming Agent Metadata Service of the National Digital Library will expand the service to include archives and museums.
Arto is a collection of Finnish periodical and monograph articles in Melinda. Arto's information may be searched in Finna and they may be utilised via user interfaces, for example, in publication information searches in higher education institutions.
With the help of Article data entry form any library, scientific publisher or scientific society may store articles in their own fields, subject matter or their own publications in way that will make them easier to find.
Description rules provide guidelines to the party doing the describing in how to produce high-quality metadata.Production of descriptions requires competence in description rules.
Cataloguing standard service provides instructions on how Finnish description rules should be applied when describing library materials as well as agents, places and topics related to the materials.Description rules used in Finland are RDA (Resource Description and Access) and ISBD (International Standard Bibliographic Description). It is also possible to receive training in the use of the rules.
Contract-based electronic deposit of newspapers
A newspaper can be delivered electronically to the National Library of Finland.The submitting party and the National Library of Finland will negotiate and agree the details.
Electronic submission refers to the submission of materials used in printing or publication of the newspaper electronically together with the metadata related to the files.Files may include print PDF as well as image and text files.
The aim is
to ensure high quality preservation of culture-historically valuable materials and
Digi contains the National Library's
Digitisation
We offer digitisation of paper materials from materials belonging to the National Library of Finland collection or customer's own materials.We also manufacture digital recordings from microfilm, microfiche, photographic materials and sound recordings.We are specialised in the digitisation of large collections as well as materials in poor condition and requiring careful handling.
Digitisation partnership
The National Library of Finland offers digitisation partnerships to publishers with the help of which the publisher and the library can digitise shared materials while sharing costs.In accordance with its social duty, the National Library of Finland will get the right to place digitised materials in use of research and teaching to researchers, universities, polytechnics, museums and archives, based on contracts.
Copyright issues of publications will have to be cleared.The parties will agree on placing the materials in use.
Dublin Core format is a format developed for describing digital materials. In principle, it enables simple and easy description by also individuals outside the library field. The National Library of Finland maintains Finnish application and saving instructions and produces application profiles for various materials. The format is used in publication archives, such as the Doria service of the National Library of Finland. The library is a member of the background organisation of the Dublin Core format, DCMI (Dublin Core Metadata Initiative) and participates in its administration.
Elektra is a service provided collaboratively by the National Library of Finland and Kopiosto, which contains copyrighted articles from Finnish scientific journals.The materials comprise over 30,000 articles from approximately 40 journals, mainly from the mid-1990s onwards.
Europeana Formula service allows Finnish archives, libraries and museums to submit metadata on their materials in the pan-European digital cultural heritage portal, Europeana (europeana.eu).The National Library of Finland supervises organisations, which have the agreement, in what kind of background work is involved in exporting the metadata.Europeana gives the materials a wider audience and its contents are utilised in many innovative projects promoting the accessibility of digital culture.
Fennica - the Finnish National Bibliography is a database dedicated to the Finnish national imprint.
It contains information on books from 1488, newspapers frorm 1711, series, maps, audiovisuals and electronic materials. It also includes prepublication data from publishers and information on materials published outside of Finland that relate to Finland or are written by a Finnish author. The database also has information on ephemera publications.
FinELib consortium centrally provides consortium's member organisations with electronic resources. FinELib office operates at the National Library of Finland and negotiates license agreements on electronic resources and on open publication on behalf of the consortium members.
The licensing principles of the FinELib consortium are adhered to the acquisition of the resources. As a rule, attention is paid to the key factors of the acquisition, such as consortium discount, rights to use the resources, liability issues and availability of use statistics.
Finna brings together the materials from Finnish archives, libraries and museums.
The service provides you with information on available materials and offers a direct access to some of the digitised materials.
In addition to the national view, Finna is a search service entity containing several sites in addition to the nationwide finna.fi site. Organisations can use the Finna platform to create their own search service or online library. The content of organisation-specific sites is usually limited to the material of those individual organisations.
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.
We only send out loanable materials and some reading room loans.
We do not send out National Collection materials as interlibrary loans but we can make reproductions of them. We will send microfilms of newspapers in the National Collection as reading room loans only when they are unavailable elsewhere.
The National Library of Finland materials can be found:
National Library's Search Service
An ISBN identifies books intended for public use. The Finnish national ISBN Agency is responsible for handing out ISBNs in Finland. The Agency maintains a national publisher register and provides information about Finnish publishers for national and international use.
An ISMN identifies sheet music intended for public use. The Finnish national ISBN Agency is also responsible for handing out ISMNs in Finland. The Agency maintains a national publisher register and provides information about Finnish publishers for national and international use.
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: toimijakuvailu-posti@helsinki.fi.
ISSN identifies continuously published publications. The Finnish national ISSN Agency is responsible for providing the identifiers in Finland and sends the information about publications that have received an ISSN to the ISSN Portal database.
Juuli publication infornation portal is meant for browsing and searching publication information of Finnish research organisations.Reference data contained by Juuli has been collected from the research data systems of Finnish higher education institutions in conjunction information retrieval by the Ministry of Education and Culture.
The National Library of Finland’s support for the KITT2 statistics database has ended. The last joint statistics were published in May 2020.
The Research Library Statistics Database’s seasons 2002–2020 will remain available for browsing and searching in its current address https://yhteistilasto.lib.helsinki.fi/?lang=en until the end of 2022.
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:
The National Library of Finland provides a library system service based on the free open-source Koha software. Libraries can use the system to manage acquisitions and borrowing relating to their collections.
The service includes system maintenance, development work agreed in detail with customers, and the coordination of the server platform procurement. The service is provided together with CSC – IT Center for Science Ltd.
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 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.
Metadata thesaurus contains terms and expressions required in describing materials. The thesaurus is also suitable for selecting headings displayed in user interfaces. It also enhances automatic processing of metadata (machine-readability, automatic translation, linkability).
The thesaurus is organised according to the entity-relationship structure of the RDA text and the FRBR concept model. Each term and phrase has its own permanent identifier (URI).
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.
The Fennica National Bibliography is a database of Finnish publications maintained by the National Library of Finland. Fennica is available as open data using the CC0 license, which allows free use for any purpose. You can browse the data with a user interface at http://data.nationallibrary.fi.
Additionally the National Library is publishing several other databases and APIs. You can find more information in the Data Catalog.
Peri+ is a service provided by the National Library of Finland in cooperation with Kopiosto. The service contains old scientific journals.
The journals subject to copyright are available at libraries that have signed the contract.
Journals in the service (freely available online until 1920):
The publication archive services offer the customer organisation a repository system to help manage and publish digital documents. These documents may be texts, such as articles, final theses, books or reports; or pictures, audio recordings or videos. Customers have at their disposal a data entry form for describing and exporting the materials to the repository, but materials may also be imported to the repository from other systems with automatic processes. It is also easy to export materials and related metadata to other systems.
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).
A URN identifier is a unique and persistent identifier of an electronic document.
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.
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 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.
The personnel of the library are happy to present the collections and research opportunities provided by them to student groups from higher education and other educational institutions.
The National Library of Finland offers excellent materials for thesis work. We also provide assistance in information retrieval and use of electronic materials.
The service is provided free of charge.
The National Library organises cultural events and exhibitions open to all as well as training and other events designed for professional librarians.
Kansalliskirjasto järjestää vuosittain erilaisia näyttelyitä. Kirjaston monipuolinen kulttuuritoiminta tarjoaa elämyksiä, iloa ja innostusta kirjakulttuuriin ja tiedonhakuun kaikille kansalaisille. Näyttelyihin ja tapahtumiin on vapaa pääsy.
Please note that there are very few guided tours available in 2021.
A guided tour is available to groups with 5 to 15 participants. The tour lasts approximately 45 minutes and takes the group into the various floors of the old library building, so we recommend that possible reduced mobility issues are discussed already when booking the tour.
Groups can enquire about guided tours at the National Library of Finland by sending an email to kk-opastukset@helsinki.fi.
You can contact our information service:
Please book an appointment for information retrieval guidance, and you will get a chance to search for information together with a library expert.
Information search lasting less than half an hour is free. More extensive commissions will be charged according to the valid price list.
Our information service helps you to find information and materials from the National Collection and the fields of humanities represented by the library collections. On commission, we perform information searches on the printed and digital collections of the library as well as other online materials.
You can submit an information retrieval request by email, by phone or on site at the library information service point.
At the ILL borrowing services of the National Library of Finland, we order loans and reproductions for you from other libraries in Finland or abroad.
We will find the work required for you and get you a loan or a copy as affordably and quickly as possible. It is also possible to order material that is not available at that moment in time at the National Library.
Using the customer premises of the National Library of Finland and the materials from the open collections and the reference library in the reading rooms does not require a library card.
National Library card can be granted to a person, who:
Taking out loans from the National Library of Finland requires a National Library card. Loaning materials is done using the self-service book-lending machines located on our library premises. For borrowing materials, you will need a library card and the four-digit PIN code. All books borrowed must be returned within 28 days.
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.
Researchers and university students can apply for designated facilities in the National Library for long-term and intensive work via an application.
There is no customer service during self-service hours, and the Special Collections Reading Room is not open.
(Customer service is open on Mon – Fri from10 am to 5 pm)
During self-service hours you can
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.
Submitting legal deposit copies of printed matters and recordings according to the Act on Collecting and Preserving Cultural Materials (Laki kulttuuriaineistojen tallettamisesta ja säilyttämisestä 1433/2007).
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. Legal deposit collections also include material that would otherwise quickly become unavailable or that other libraries do not collect. .
Party responsible for submitting materials is: