Ambitious Aviisi aims to increase the availability of copyrighted newspapers

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The National Library’s Aviisi project is joining the major societal shift to digital. This shift is characterised by media companies struggling with their printed newspapers, their readership figures, and, consequently, advertising profits, which are declining faster than the profits from digital services are increasing.

 

By Pirjo Karppinen, Project Manager, Centre for Preservation and Digitisation, the National Library of Finland

 

Newspapers – the nation’s rich collective memory

Finns have always been enthusiastic readers: daily newspapers have informed us of topical events throughout the decades, whether in the realm of politics, finance, science, culture or art. Newspapers narrate and store local and national news in the national memory clearly and concisely, and from different perspectives.

The Aviisi project is working and negotiating with media companies, the Kopiosto Copyright Society and the National Library to release copyright-restricted digital newspaper materials from the 20th and 21st centuries more extensively than current legislation allows. By cooperating and digitising the full process chain, we can streamline functions and promote the use of the material.

The Aviisi project is a collaborative effort between the public and private sectors, and a step towards an open information society.

The more extensive use of digital newspaper materials is being piloted for research and teaching in universities and universities of applied sciences, comprehensive schools and upper secondary schools, an adult education centre and, in the Mikkeli region of eastern Finland, a library.

The extensive digital materials enable the use of cross-disciplinary, pedagogical cooperative learning methods in history, social studies, art and other subjects. In cooperation with adult education centres and libraries, the material can be used to organise courses for senior citizens so they can learn IT skills by researching information that interests them. The digital archives of newspapers constitute abundant source material for big data research. In the field of digital humanities, masses of text are studied through computational methods and models. The materials are a treasure trove for many different disciplines.

Based on experiences from the pilots, practices will be evaluated and developed to enable rendering newspaper materials available more comprehensively to different target groups. The Aviisi project is a collaborative effort between the public and private sectors, and a step towards an open information society.

 

Huge treasure troves already online

Finnish newspapers published in 1910 or earlier have already been digitised and are openly available online. These newspapers can be found in the National Library’s digital newspaper library at www.digi.kansalliskirjasto.fi. The newer newspapers from 1911 onwards are under copyright, and only a fraction of them have been digitised. The National Library wants to actively promote the digitisation of this valuable cultural heritage, currently hidden in musty archives, so that the material can be provided for the use of researchers, teachers and society at large.

In Finland, the digitisation effort has received no public funding. The National Library is striving to digitise copyright-protected newspapers and periodicals from the 20th century together with its partners, which include publishers, rights holders and copyright organisations. The National Library and its partners are dividing the cost of digitisation and can each use the digitised materials as agreed.

A collection drive to support the digitisation of our cultural heritage has been launched to celebrate the centennial of Finland’s independence in 2017 at www.rahasto.kansalliskirjasto.fi/

  • The Aviisi project is being conducted by the University of Helsinki’s Centre for Preservation and Digitisation in Mikkeli. Funded by the European Regional Development Fund, the project is also supported by the City of Mikkeli, media companies Kaakon Viestintä Oy and Viestilehdet Oy as well as the Kopiosto Copyright Society. The project will be carried out in 2015-2016.

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