University of Helsinki
Digital libraries, archives, and museums create the opportunity for hosts of cultural content to reach people across cultural divides in numbers and locations unknown and unforeseen. For digital libraries such as Finna, the challenge is to create a positive user experience for audiences in diverse and undefined cultural contexts. Advances in machine learning technologies could be the solution to scaling human-centric user experiences to large, diverse audiences.
By Molly Schwartz, visiting Fulbright Scholar at Aalto University’s Media Lab and the National Library of Finland, and Heli Kautonen, Head of Services at the National Library of Finland, leader of Finna’s usability work.
Cultural heritage breaks barriers
Cultural heritage has a way of transcending cultural differences to unite us as individuals who share a common humanity. There is a reason why people enjoy visiting museums, galleries, and other cultural heritage exhibits when they visit a new country or region: by confronting the artifacts, paintings, and books that showcase our collective cultural differences, we can appreciate the common threads of humanity that weave through the linguistic, historical, political, anthropological, and sociological divides. Broadening our cultural horizons deepens our knowledge about others and ourselves.
There is real potential in using large aggregations of cultural heritage content on digital platforms to break down the traditional national and linguistic barriers and make cultural knowledge available to all in a usable and accessible format.
Which is why the concept of radically broadening access to culture is so exciting. New technologies let libraries, archives, and museums share their cultural treasure boxes with the world over digital platforms, and reversely individual users can freely find and interact with information when it is available on the internet. There is real potential in using large aggregations of cultural heritage content on digital platforms to break down the traditional national and linguistic barriers and make cultural knowledge available to all in a usable and accessible format. Finna, a web portal that aims to make all Finnish library, archives, and museum materials accessible in a restrictions-free format, is one player in this larger phenomenon.
Fig. 1. A Knut Hilden candy wrapper from 1890 that can be found in the Helsinki City Museum archives (available in Finna, www.finna.fi)
Wider audiences for Finnish culture through Finland’s digital library
As a public service developed and maintained by the National Library of Finland, Finna is, primarily and in principle, designed for every Finnish citizen. But as a resource that is freely available over the internet, it provides Finnish cultural heritage institutions with the opportunity to reach a global audience. From the users’ perspective, only via digital services can they access materials that would be otherwise out of their reach, e.g. on the other side of the globe. There are audiences, such as students or researchers of history and culture, that could benefit from accessing materials in another country that they currently know nothing about.
The possibility of transcending national and geographic borders to reach audiences across the globe is an opportunity for Finland. Physically remote, small in population size, and advanced in technical and civic infrastructure, Finland has the potential to build an innovative service that is also robust and sustainable. Through strong national collaboration across libraries, archives and museums, Finna can, in few years, claim to incorporate a comprehensive collection of Finnish cultural heritage.
Going Global: Evaluating the use of Finna abroad
Over the course of the past eight months the National Library of Finland has been a partner in a study to evaluate how effectively the national view of Finna currently serves audiences outside of Finland who have compelling reasons to use the service. In collaboration with a visiting Fulbright scholar from the United States and Aalto University, the design team at Finland have been investigating the following questions: How do audiences outside of the mainstream target audience in Finland use and experience Finna? What barriers, if any, prevent diverse audiences from accessing and using the service?
The study included a round of surveys and interviews with students and professors of Finnish studies at universities in the United States. The results indicated that portals such Finna make it easier to find open content from a particular region and reduce legal and technical complexities, such as geo-blocking, that students have experienced.
The results of the study showed that there would be interest in using Finna abroad.
While conducting remote evaluations of how users experience the national view of the Finna interface (www.finna.fi), it was fascinating to observe that U.S. students struggled with the language barrier. Despite the option to view the site in English by clicking links located in the upper right corner of the homepage, users were not familiar with such a convention – they are used to entering sites in single language and had difficulties converting the site to the English-language version. Students and professors also had limited experience with digital portals that provide access to different types cultural heritage institutions in an aggregated format, so there was some confusion upon entering the website about what it was and what could be found there.
Fig. 2. The National View of Finna on a laptop browser
The Finna team has not started actively marketing the service to the general public because it is still growing rapidly and developing the technical infrastructure, but the results of the study showed that there would be interest in using Finna abroad. Professors of Finnish at the university level in the United States were particularly enthusiastic about having a single, trustworthy source for finding Finnish materials and they reacted positively to the design of Finna’s website. After Finna starts reaching a broader audience in the general public through increased marketing campaigns all Finna partner organizations can incorporate knowledge about how users outside the Finnish cultural context experience the service to increase the ways they benefit from it.
Smarter services in a human context
While linguistic barriers continue to restrict access to foreign cultures in physical and digital environments, there are researchers in the field of machine learning and text mining who are making great strides in the field. A past article in the National Library of Finland Bulletin explains that Timo Honkela, a distinguished machine learning scholar who has experience working in research institutions and private companies, believes that rapid progressing text mining technologies will be capable of not only bridging language divides, but also bridging more subtle emotional and cultural differences in the transmission of information. That means that technology would not only enable searches across languages on platforms such as Finna, but it could also provide options to summarize text in ways that are more understandable to different audiences.
Institutions that facilitate the discovery of knowledge, such as libraries, archives, and museums, have traditionally been structured organizations with professional operators in the public service sector. With the advent of digital technologies information-seeking behaviors have become freewheeling, decentralized, unstructured, more accessible, and less restricted. With the creation of portals like Finna that incorporate aspects of both old and new formats of knowledge discovery, it is possible to push the boundaries and experiment with ways that cultural heritage can transcend some of the boundaries of past public service models. Can we bridge cultural divides in ways that were previously unforeseen? Can we give individuals more individual agency to shape their lives through easy access to information? These are major societal questions in which libraries, archives and museums can, should, and are playing an active role.