University of Helsinki
Finna, the shared public interface for Finnish archives, libraries and museums, has been in use since autumn 2013. New materials are constantly being added on Finna as new organisations join in. Participating organisations are also developing their own Finna interfaces to integrate into their services. The Vaski libraries in south-western Finland were the first public library organisation to adopt Finna and to show the way for wider adoption.
By Timo Laine, Information Systems Specialist, Library Network Services, the National Library of Finland
Finna is being developed at the National Library as an open source project. At the moment, development is focused on transferring to version 2 of the VuFind software which is the basis of Finna. The National Library has made improvements for Finna to VuFind version 1, and the modular structure of version 2 will make it significantly easier to make changes and maintain the system locally. After the transfer, the Finna source code will be more tightly connected to the main branch of VuFind. This means that cooperation with the international developer community will be more flexible.
Since the beginning of this year, the future of Finna has been planned in conjunction with the strategy preparations that aim to create development guidelines for the next strategic period, 2016-2020. The new strategy will be completed by the end of 2015.
One of the fundamental points of the strategy is that Finna will be developed to meet the needs of our changing society. Another core goal is to create services in a cost-effective manner. The more organisations that adopt Finna, the bigger the benefits.
“One of the fundamental points of the strategy is that Finna will be developed to meet the needs of our changing society
To enable widespread adoption, Finna must be useful to organisations. Replying to current demands is not enough: Finna must also be ready for the future. Finna will have an important role to play, for example, in opening data. When machine-readable open data interfaces are created for Finna, participating organisations will not have to create them for themselves, and all Finna materials will be available conveniently from the same interface.
The needs of participating organisations are naturally connected to those of their clients. Finna has been made as user-friendly as possible, and has garnered positive feedback. A challenge for the future and the key to user satisfaction will be to make Finna interesting to users. Many of the participating organisations have traditionally focused on sharing reliable information. However, in addition to reliability, Finna must be able to offer new surprises and engaging experiences .
The Finna strategy is not restricted to Finna as a system. All of the services offered by Finna to its users must be implemented in the Finna back-end systems, and Finna will use them through its interfaces. This means Finna is first and foremost a portal to services. This development model requires fluent cooperation with participating organisations, so that the solutions being created will be available to all who need them.