Towards a National Digital Library: The Case of Finland

Abstract

In the last few years libraries in Finland have taken important steps towards a national digital library. Since the National Library (NL) is financed by the country's global university budget, its responsibilities are officially restricted to university libraries, but efforts have been made to open its network to other types of library. After a long process, all Finnish academic libraries have adopted a common computer system (since 2001, Voyager). There is a consortium (Linnea2), with the NL as its organizer and development and service unit. A joint programme for purchasing licences for electronic journals, launched in 1997, is run as a National Electronic Library Programme (FinELib), which is part of the NL's own work programme. The NL's central role extends also to retrieving and archiving electronic publications, which will be covered by a new legal deposit law. Dependence on a single service provider might not work everywhere, but in Finland it has led to considerable advances at a much lower cost than if libraries had acted separately. Behind the Finnish solutions is a strategic thinking that acknowledges that libraries are working in a common electronic space in which effort will not be duplicated as it used to be.