The use and production of electronic services increased dramatically
Published: 4.2.2010
In 2009 the popularity of the electronic services provided by the National Library of Finland continued to grow.
The use of digitised materials increased from 4.8 million downloaded pages in 2008 to 6.5 million in 2009 (a 35% rise). A total of 16.3 million articles were downloaded from the FinElib National Electronic Library, which means a 50% rise from the previous year.
The National Library has been unflagging in developing its electronic services. In 2009 some 1.6 million new digitised pages were produced for customer use, while the corresponding number was 500,000 pages during the previous year.
This dramatic growth is largely explained by the government subsidy granted to the National Library (in the national supplementary budget) through the Ministry of Education, which enabled the National Digitation Centre in Mikkeli to hire 21 additional employees for six months.
In April 2009, the National Library launched a web archive where web material posted in Finland for public viewing is saved and stored. In the course of the year, some 150 million files were saved in the archive. Production growth was huge compared with the previous year, when web harvesting produced a little over 61 million files.
The National Library’s collections grew by one shelf kilometre in 2009. At the end of the year, the largest collections in the country comprised about 108 shelf kilometres. Over 20,000 new titles were catalogued in the Fennica National Bibliography and over 3,700 new recordings or published sheet music were catalogued in the Viola National Discography.
While the use of electronic library services increased as expected, the use of on-site services decreased. The research library on Unioninkatu had close to 180,000 visitors in 2009, while the corresponding figure was over 190,000 in 2008 (a 6% drop). Also, for the first time during the past decade, the number of borrowed printed materials decreased (a 6% drop).
Customer satisfaction among on-site customers was 8.9 on a scale of 0-10, an improvement of one decimal point from the previous year.
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The National Library of Finland is the oldest and largest scholarly library in Finland. Presently the annual budget of the National Library totals some EUR 26 million and the number of employees is 280.
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