Abstracts in English

The challenge of the electronic environment to the organization of knowledge

This was the title of the second international seminar on Subject Access to Information, organized by the International Relations Group of the Finnish Research Library Association. It took place in Helsinki on the 29th to 30th November, 2007. The target group of the seminar was research librarians, information and subject specialists and students of information studies, and it attracted over a hundred interested participants from all over Europe. The article gives a summary of the main topics.

All the seminar presentations are available on the web at the address
http://tds.terkko.helsinki.fi/dspace/handle/10250/132141?locale=en
 

New ISSN

A completely revised version of the International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) has been published as ISO 3297:2007. The standard will be translated into Finnish in the beginning of 2008.

Marja Seppälä, the head of the Finnish ISSN Centre discusses the revision and the impact it will have on the work of Finnish publishers and libraries.

For further information, please contact

  • Ms. Marja(-Liisa) Seppälä, Head of the Finnish ISSN Centre
    The National Library of Finland / Finnish ISSN Centre
    P.O.B. 26
    FIN-00014 UNIVERSITY OF HELSINKI, Finland
    Email: marja-liisa.seppala (at) helsinki.fi

 

Integration of Nelli portal to e-learning environments

The Finnish Nelli (National Electronic Library Interface) information retrieval portal is the main source of electronic materials for both students and researchers. As also the learning environment is becoming more and more electronic the integration of these two systems has become more essential.

This article discusses the IMS Content Packaging as a solution for doing this efficiently.

For further information, please contact

  • Mr Erkki Tolonen, Systems Analyst
    The National Library of Finland / Library Network Services
    P.O.B. 26
    FIN-00014 UNIVERSITY OF HELSINKI, Finland
    Email: erkki.tolonen (at) helsinki.fi

 

Survey of Nordic institutional repositories

The Nordic Council of Ministers is funding a project to promote Open Access publishing. Nordbib Work Package 3 which kicked off in Summer 2007 is titled Development of Information Environment Architecture for Nordic Countries. This WP is coordinated by the National Library of Finland; the other partners are the National Library of Sweden, the Norwegian NORA project and a joint working group of Danish institutional repositories and library standardisation organisations. The project is focusing especially on dissertations and theses. URN identifiers and their resolution services are also promoted. This part of the project is coordinated by the National Library of Sweden.

In Autumn 2007 the project launched a survey to get an idea of the current situation. The questions cover metadata schemes, software and compliance with harvesting tools. The results represent altogether 92 institutional repositories in the Nordic countries. This article discusses the preliminary results from the 22 Finnish repositories.

For further information, please contact

  • Mr. Joel Peltonen, Project Coordinator, Nordbib WP3
    The National Library of Finland / Library Network Services
    P.O.B. 26
    FIN-00014 UNIVERSITY OF HELSINKI, Finland
    Email: joel.peltonen (at) helsinki.fi

 

Finnish Academic libraries’ hardware project 2006-2007

In February 2006 a project was launched to refurbish the outdated harware of the Finnish academic library consortia, which was located at CSC, the Finnish IT Centre for Science. This hardware was owned and maintained by all the 50 universities and polytechnics, and partly also by the public libraries that were members of the NELLI-consortium. Altogether this is the largest joint IT venture within the Education sector in Finland.

Besides the very complicated and bureaucratic decision making process another problem was that the hardware cluster itself was extensive. It comprised of 5 major servers and a dozen smaller web servers as well as several tape drives and system boards.

The project group introduced a totally new model of subscribing to an all inclusive service package instead of buying just the hardware. This package would consist of hardware, maintenance and support which would all be provided by CSC.

The new package went into production in Autumn 2007. All the servers were replaced by one big enterprise server and all other components were integrated with the service providers’ centralized systems. This also brought remarkable savings in the annual maintenance costs.

For further information, please contact

  • Mr. Esko Ala-Peijari, Secretary General of ICT
    The Ministry of Education
    e-mail: esko.ala-peijari (at) minedu.fi
  • Mr. Juha Hakala, Director of IT
    The National Library of Finland
    e-mail: juha.hakala (at) helsinki.fi
  • Mr. Thomas Roos, Systems Manager
    CSC, Finnish IT Centre for Science
    e-mail: thomas.roos (at) csc.fi