ISSN identifies continuously published publications. The Finnish national ISSN Agency is responsible for providing the identifiers in Finland and sends the information about publications that have received an ISSN to the ISSN Portal database.

Identifiers as a part of metadata serve the publishing industry and library sector in their entirety and support identification, processing and availability of publications.

An ISBN identifies books intended for public use. Finland's national ISBN Agency is responsible for handing out ISBNs in Finland. The Agency maintains a national publisher register and provides information about Finnish publishers for national and international use.

The Agency maintains a national publisher register and provides information about Finnish publishers for national and international use.

Identifiers as a part of metadata serve the publishing industry and library sector in their entirety and support identification, processing and availability of publications. The identifiers are used, for example, in publishing industry's ordering and distribution systems to speed up the recognition of publications as well as international and domestic joint catalogues, bibliographies, library lending systems and information retrieval.

Finna is composed of the Finna.fi search service, which brings all the resources together, and hundreds of other individual Finna search services created by museums, libraries and archives. Using versatile search functions, you can easily access millions of items quickly and easily.

Finna includes almost five hundred customer organisations.

Finto is a thesaurus and ontology service free for all users. Finto contents include e.g. General Finnish Ontology YSO and YSO-places, a Metadata thesaurus, and Kanto - national agent names. Finto also provides several domain ontologies, domain thesauri and classifications as well as the KOKO ontology cloud which links a dozen of Finnish domain ontologies to YSO. The thesauri and ontologies in Finto are published as linked data and contribute to interoperability across language and institutional borders.

The National Library’s friendship programme is open to everyone interested in literary culture and cultural heritage. The programme is informal in nature, and free of charge to join.

Please find more details about the programme on our Finnish and Swedish pages.

Please book an appointment for information retrieval guidance, and you will get a chance to search for information together with a library expert.

Information search lasting less than half an hour is free. More extensive commissions will be charged according to the valid price list.

Guided tours are organised on Tuesdays 3pm-4pm and Fridays 11am-12am only. If the COVID-19 situation changes, opening hours and services can change quickly.

A guided tour is available to groups with 5 to 15 participants. The tour lasts approximately 45 minutes and takes the group into the various floors of the old library building, so we recommend that possible reduced mobility issues are discussed already when booking the tour.

Our information service helps you to find information and materials from the National Collection and the fields of humanities represented by the library collections. On commission, we perform information searches on the printed and digital collections of the library as well as other online materials.

You can submit an information retrieval request by email, by phone or on site at the library information service point.

• Maksullisen asiantuntijatyön tilaus (eLomake, in Finnish)

Interlibrary borrowing for private customers

At the interlibrary borrowing services of the National Library of Finland, we order loans and reproductions for you from other libraries in Finland or abroad.

We will find the requested material and get a loan or a copy as affordably and quickly as possible. We can also order material owned by the National Library that is at that moment not available.