Speaker
Riitta Peltonen (National Library of Finland)
Abstract
Finna.fi is national search site In Finland that combines materials coming from over 450 Finnish libraries, archives and museums (later LAM organisations) under one national search interface. Around 2019 we realised in that providing pure search interface is not enough to make cultural collections approachable enough for e.g. education purposes. Since then we have created under Finna.fi content area Finna Classroom, where Finnish LAM organisations can curate and exhibit their collections for education purposes. Finna Classroom and related curation work originally was piloted with the existing features of the Finna platform (VuFind based open software platform). We have now three years’ experience from orchestrating this work. We will share what helped us to make strategic decisions in this type of networked environment and what this type of collaboration requires in practice from operational point of view?
In Finna we also have studied interests of Finnish LAM organisations to do similar valorisation work related to other target groups. During the year 2023 we have been creating separate and better admin tool for organisations for curating material packages, in order to improve their features (e.g. findability) and improve operational aspects related to them. We have ideas to expand this type of curation work done by the organisations towards research and hobbyist groups. We also have ideas what it would require in practise.
In this presentation we share: 1) how we utilised user research and co-creation with LAM organisations to help the strategic decision making , 2) our operational learnings from the orchestration of the Finna Classroom work and 3) our thoughts what possibilities we have for expanding this type of work for other target groups like researchers or hobbyists.
The National Library of Finland has responsibilities in Finland to offer services to other libraries and cultural heritage services and nowadays this often means digital infrastructure. Finna services are produced in network of organisations, in meta-organisation. The National Library of Finland (NLF) does the platform development and the content is provided by the Finnish LAM organisations that have created contract with NLF. Finna Services contains group of services:
- the common Finna index of all the materials and the national search site Finna.fi,
- programmable interfaces e.g. open search API, and OAI-PMH harvesting interface to all the materials in the common Finna index and
- platform service i.e. LAM organisations providing content to the common Finna index can also build their own site focused on their own materials on top of Finna tools.
Once we have the new collection package tool in use, it also brings new technical possibilities to reuse of packages through platforms services and through programmable interfaces as well. In this presentation we also share thoughts related to what possibilities these can offer from valorisation of cultural heritage collections point of view.