Data services

Service description

Data services serve a wide range of students, researchers, artists, and other data users, regardless of their discipline. Even those who are not researchers can take advantage of the data. Digitised materials also have a download tool that can be used to create a data set that is suitable for your purposes. You can access the data independently with the data catalogue and tools developed by the National Library. You can use the data with the support of the National Library of Finland’s expertise or in co-operation projects with the National Library. The use of copyrighted data, such as online archives, can be explored in co-operation projects. 

Data catalogue

The data catalogue has links to the materials compiled and published by the National Library of Finland, such as full texts of the digitised materials, metadata of library databases, and dictionaries. The catalogue also contains instructions for using the materials with the help of interfaces.

Read more about the data catalogue

Using licensed materials as data  

The National Library of Finland has licensed digital and digitised source material collections, magazine archives, and databases. The aim is to negotiate the right for data mining in material use agreements. In current agreements, researchers and students at the University of Helsinki have such a right to the materials of the Russian media portal Integrum.  

More information: kk-tutkijapalvelut@helsinki.fi  

Digi services for researchers  

Digitised materials can be utilised in research in many ways. You can read and browse them. You can make references to the contents for material lists. By logging in to the service, you have access to a clipping function, which allows you to create your own clippings library. In addition, you can search for clippings made by other users.

Check out our Digital Collections service

Data obtained as open data can be downloaded as ready-made data packages or with a download tool, in which case the downloaded material is selected on a user-oriented basis. Read more about the development of the tool (in Finnish) and the project in which it was developed. 

Data clinics

Data clinics give participants an overview of the data materials offered by the National Library of Finland, as well as ideas for how to review them and the means by which the data can be examined. They are an opportunity to take an in-depth look at the National Library of Finland’s digitised materials and the data packages created from them under the guidance of specialists.

The National Library of Finland has diverse data materials for research and is a competent research partner. For example, digitised materials benefit digital humanities researchers in various fields. Digitisations, the resulting data and the tools needed to process the data provide new opportunities for data-driven research. 

Data clinics consist of a lecture and a workshop. In the first session, you will get to know the National Library of Finland’s digitised entities, data catalogue and open data services. The second session uses exercises to delve into the possibilities offered by digi.kansalliskirjasto.fi for digital humanities and the data generated by digitisation. The participant will simultaneously be challenged to consider their own research topic in relation to the National Library of Finland’s materials.

Participation in the data clinic does not require previous experience from methods of digital humanities. It is aimed specifically at students in institutes of higher education. The duration of the data clinic is 2 x 90 minutes, and it can be arranged either on site or as a remote event. Data clinics are free of charge.

Schedule a data clinic for your student group by sending a message to kansalliskirjasto@helsinki.fi.

We also organise presentations of our collections and services for student groups.