Effortless access to digital cultural heritage and the related information resources and services enables the widespread utilisation of cultural heritage in society. High-quality and reliable digital materials provided by archives, libraries and museums represent a societal resource with numerous uses. These materials can be used in education, research, studies, the dissemination of information and in the work done by experts from different fields. Indeed, they serve a wide range of civic information-related needs and recreational activities.
Finnish archives, libraries and museums make their materials available via several different digital channels. The centralised national availability service Finna has been developed to complement and partially replace these channels. Finnish archives, libraries and museums provide their materials and services for use on the national Finna.fi search service. With the help of Finna.fi, users can find the information and materials that they need with the help of a single service that can go beyond organisational boundaries. The tools provided by the Finna platform service allow archives, libraries and museums to implement their own local search services to meet the needs of their customers. Europeana provides access to digital cultural heritage on a pan-European scale.
The availability of open cultural heritage data provides opportunities for the reuse of digital cultural heritage resources, for example, in application development, creative industries, education and science. Finna.fi and Europeana provide cultural heritage data for widespread use with the help of open APIs (application programming interfaces).