Saving Our Literary Heritage Gets Underway

A new project to save Finland's national literature from deterioration was launched at the National Library's Centre for Preservation and Digitisation in Mikkeli in January. To this end the Centre has hired new staff to deal with the digitisation and handling of books and periodicals in poor condition.

Brittle materials found in condition survey are being digitised

Helsinki University Library - the National Library of Finland has been carrying out a condition survey of its national collection since 2001. The surveyed material covers the period from 1810 to 1944. This is a unique collection of Finnish printed matter from this time-period. Even a small loss of this material would result in a loss of the nation's collective memory.

The first stage of the random sample survey revealed that as many as 44,000 books published in Finland between 1810 and 1944 should be withdrawn from circulation altogether. The paper of these books is brittle and acidic to the extent that the process of deterioration is well under way. The worst affected are periodicals and books in subject areas such as history, linguistics, Finnish folk poetry, defence and higher education institutions.

In 2004 the National Library received ¿350,000 from the Ministry of Education for the digitisation of deteriorating materials. With this money we can save some two thousand items, mainly periodicals and literature on travel and geography. We selected these because they are in great demand or the degree of brittleness has reached alarming levels.

The process goes as follows. First the staff in charge of reformatting preparation prepares the materials for microfilming and digitisation. Catalogue records are created and bibliographic data collected. Digitising technicians then scan the highly demanding material using scanners with book cradles. Finally the digitised materials undergo further processing, which is often as time-consuming as the scanning itself. Of the digitised material we can put online copyright-free material published in the 19th century.

For further information please contact:

Majlis Bremer-Laamanen, Head of Preservation Services
Telephone +358 (0)15 321 1220, email Majlis.Bremer-Laamanen@helsinki.fi

Helsinki University Library - the National Library of Finland
Centre for Preservation and Digitisation in Mikkeli
http://www.lib.helsinki.fi/english/libraries/dimiko/