National Digital Library of Finland: Putting the Resources of Culture, Science and Teaching at Everyone's Fingertips

1
National Digital Library
of Finland: Putting the
Resources of Culture,
Science and Teaching at
Everyone's Fingertips
Kautonen, Heli
heli.kautonen@finlit.fi
Finnish Literature Society, SKS, Finland
Sainio, Tapani
tapani.sainio@fmp.fi
The National Digital Library project, Finland
Vakkari, Mikael
mikael.vakkari@nba.fi
The National Board of Antiquities, Finland
1. Aims of the Project
The National Digital Library is one of
the research, innovation, and creativity
environments developed under the strategic
policies of the Ministry of Education of
Finland. It implements national culture and
science policies by increasing the availability
of the digital resources of libraries, archives
and museums, by developing their long-term
preservation, by establishing an important
research infrastructure, and by strengthening
virtual learning environments.
The National Digital Library project is also the
Finnish response to the joint objectives of the
European Union Member States on digitisation
of cultural materials and scientific information,
and their electronic availability and long-term
preservation. The National Digital Library will
serve as the Finnish aggregator for Europeana.
The project has four main goals:
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to build one national access point, a public
interface, to digital resources of libraries,
archives and museums (operational in 2011)
-
to digitise and make available the most
essential collections of Finnish cultural
heritage organisations through the public
interface
-
to create sustainable solution for long-
term preservation of digital cultural material
(finalised plan in 2010)
-
to boost national competence in the
area of digitisation, online availability and
accessibility and long-term preservation.
Figure 1
A total of 35 organisations participate in
the project: ministries, national institutions in
charge of recording and preserving cultural
heritage, scientific and public libraries, archives,
museums, universities, research institutes,
academic associations, and representatives from
other key interest groups.
The formation of consensus and a new
enthusiasm for co-operation between sectors
has been the key issue in an undertaking
of this magnitude. On project level this has
been achieved by cross-sectoral expert groups,
using shared tools for project management,
interaction and development, and learning from
each others' practices. The central funding from
the ministry has been the corner stone of
this national project. The common standards
defined during the project, operational public
interface, and projected implementation of the
long-term preservation solution should ensure
the continuation of the co-operation within the
Finnish memory organisation sector after the
project is completed.
2. Functional principle of the
Public Interface
The born-digital and digitised resources on
cultural heritage, research, and teaching in
Finland will be accessible to end-users through
a single interface of integrated services and

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resources called the Public Interface. The Public
Interface will be the primary access point to the
resources held by libraries, museums, archives
and other information suppliers in Finland. The
national view (e.g. the national instance of the
Public Interface) will be supplemented with,
for example, customised sectoral or institutional
views.
The operational principle is to continue
cataloguing data and keep the digital objects
in the back-end systems. Metadata will be
automatically harvested to the Public Interface
and normalised and indexed for easy and
fast retrieval. Harvesting and services will
be integrated to the Public Interface through
standardised interfaces and access to the digital
objects will be provided by persistent links.
The systems architecture of the public interface
separates the user interface from the back-end
systems of organisations. This will facilitate
customer oriented services development since
more resources can be focused on user interface,
services development, and integration.
The end-users' needs and expectations have
played a major role during the project.
Information retrieval systems currently in use
are often challenging to use, and some of
them require user training before information
retrieval is possible. Much of the development
work is based on experience gained from
research on systems currently in production.
The aim is to use the gained experience
to develop a comprehensive and multifaceted
service with high usability and fast information
retrieval functionality available 24/7 anywhere.
The system provides functionality for the end
user to personalise the user interface to suit his/
her needs.
3. Resources and Metadata
Contents of the Public Interface will be digitised
or born-digital objects (images, texts, sound
files, video clips, e-publications), reference
data on physical objects (e.g. artefacts, books,
works of art, geographical locations), or other
reference data stored in databases.
The Public Interface will provide unrestricted
material for all users. It will also provide
restricted access materials subject to user
authentication, such as licensed materials (e.g.
e-journals), archive materials with restricted
viewing and use, legal deposit copies, and other
materials subject to copyright.
Since there are several content providers from
various sectors, the metadata available will
be very heterogenous. This metadata will
be harvested from several different back-end
systems to a centralised index of the Public
Interface. The metadata will be normalised to
a common internal format. This means that
the Public Interface will accept any type of
metadata, as long as the providing organisations
have implemented standardised interfaces for
harvesting.
4. Users and Usability
One of the major challenges of the project
is usability. The success of the service
depends greatly on its ability to meet the
user expectations, which have been outlined
in the requirement specifications. Usability
considerations focus mostly on the user
interface and its functionalities, which should
expose the digital content and services
within the system and enhance their value.
Furthermore, with effective user studies it will
also be possible to identify potential future
stakeholders and their needs.
The project has assigned a considerable amount
of resources to user studies and usability design.
The Usability Plan, which was realised in
autumn 2009, includes five sections:
1.
Usability principles
; By following the
discourse on the field of HCI as well as the
accomplishments of comparable projects, the
usability principles for the National Digital
Library will be established.
2.
Pre-design evaluation
; Primary target
groups, their roles as service users, and
expectations will be described in detail.
Particularly, users with vague information
needs will be examined. Central use cases and
projected information retrieval scenarios will
be modelled. The service concept will also be
tested among selected target groups.
3.
Usability evaluation
; Formal usability
evaluations will be conducted: one during the
piloting phase of the system, and another once
the system has been deployed. All evaluations

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will comprise of a usability analysis and
testing of the user interfaces.
4.
Tracking and evaluating actual use
; In order
to provide systematic data for analysing the
actual use, usage logs will be collected and
recurrent user studies conducted. On-line
communities of National Digital Library users
will be traced, monitored, or founded.
5.
User interface design
; The project will
employ a professional usability engineer
for realisation of approved usability design
principles, who will participate in all above
mentioned usability design phases.
The results of these phases will guide the design
and implementation of the Public Interface.
In addition, they will have some influence
on digitisation practices within organisations
providing material to the portal.
5. Future Perspectives
Currently the project is preparing for the pilot
phase of the Public Interface which will start
after the procurement of the Public Interface
software. After the pilot is complete, the Public
Interface is expected to be fully implemented
and go live on 2011. Plans pertaining to long-
term preservation will be completed in the
Summer 2010. It is, however, up to the next
Finnish Government to set guidelines for its
implementation and future funding.
During 2011 the NDL will transform from
a project to a more sustainable organisation
continuing the present work with the entire
library, museum and archive sector as an
essential part of the ongoing development of the
national digital infrastructure.
For more information on the National Digital
Library and the outcomes, news and other
deliverables of the project, see:
http://www.kdk
2011.fi/en
.