Viola – the Finnish national discography

Viola is the Finnish national discography and the national bibliography of sheet music.

Service links

The National Library search service National metadata repository Melinda

Service description

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 National Discography Viola, National Bibliography Fennica, as well as the National Collection, references to Finnish printed sheet music and music recordings and article references can be found in the National Library Search service.

Background information

The cataloguing of sound recordings at the National Library of Finland started in 1998. Information pertaining to older Finnish sound recordings is from the catalogues of the Finnish Institute of Recorded Sound (1901–1973), Yleisradio's Fono database (1974–1997) and the Musti database of the University of Jyväskylä (1983–1992). The information has been supplemented at the National Library of Finland. Part of the information related to the most recent recordings continues to be obtained from Yleisradio (2000–2008, 2011–).

Viola by numbers (July 2023):

approximately 140,000 music recordings of which 820,000 are individual tunes, 30,000 sheet music publications containing 130,000 individual tunes, and 5,000 music manuscripts.

Information provider and library code

The National Library of Finland, FI-NLD

In addition, the following information providers have before described their materials in Viola: Helsinki University Library, Musicology, Jyväskylä University Library, University of Jyväskylä - Department of Music, Global Music Centre, Music Archive Finland, Sibelius Academy, University of Tampere - Music Studies, Theatre Academy Library, Turku University of Applied Sciences Library, Turku University - Musicology, National Repository Library, and Sibelius Museum (Åbo Akademi).