Finnish libraries have digitised their Finnish public domain materials, which range from magazines and books to photos, maps and audio recordings.
The digi.kirjastot.fi service maintained by public libraries focuses especially on providing local materials for free use. Publications digitized by the National Library, such as books, maps, newspapers and journals, can be found at digi.kansalliskirjasto.fi. Finnish-language newspapers are freely available until the end of the year of publication in 1939, and Swedish-language newspapers until 1949. More recent digitized newspapers are available in legal deposit libraries. Researchers can also access the newspaper material with their university’s Haka login.
The National Collection’s digitized materials such as board games and ephemera as well as recordings have been published as part of the Doria publication archive, which also contains a wide range of materials from other Finnish organisations: sheet music, statistics, documents and theses, among others.
Web contents harvested by the National Library as well as submitted e-legal deposit materials, such as e-books, e-magazines, and digital music recordings are available for use at legal deposit workstations at the National Library and other legal deposit libraries, the Library of Parliament, and the National Audiovisual Institute KAVI. Harvested web pages, tweets, and video contents are available at the legal deposit workstations through the Finnish Web Archive (an index of the Web Archive is available online); e-books, e-magazines, and music recordings are available in the Varia repository archive. Radio and TV channel programming recorded by KAVI are available through KAVI’s RITVA-database.
The digital materials that have been made available by different libraries can be accessed through the Finna.fi search service.
A comprehensive overview of Finnish publications can be found via Finna with the help of the Finnish National Bibliography Fennica and the Finnish National Discography Viola, which are both maintained by the National Library of Finland. Fennica contains information on all Finnish books that have been published since 1488, every newspaper since 1771, serial publications, maps, sheet music, and audiovisual and digital materials. Viola contains information on domestic recordings and sheet music as well as any related individual works and songs.
Licensing
Public libraries acquire e-resources from commercial operators for library customers. These can be borrowed from E-library and other online library services. E-library is a shared service for municipalities, from which you can borrow e-books, audiobooks and digital magazines. E-library is accessed with a mobile application.
Metadata
Most of the metadata produced by libraries on their own collections is available on the Finna.fi service, and this data can also be accessed in aggregate form as open data via Finna’s open API (application programming interface).
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 joint repository to catalogue their materials and thus enable the further utilization of this information. Melinda includes almost 300 libraries: all Finnish university libraries, a large number of general libraries and some special libraries. Centralizing information helps libraries decrease their workload and save costs, allowing them to focus on providing their patrons with even better services.
The data and metadata produced by the National Library of Finland can be used freely. The National Library of Finland provides numerous information resources and APIs that have been published as open data with a CC0 licence. For more information on the materials that are available and how they can be used, see the Data Catalogue.