University of Helsinki
Content for the National Library’s online archive has traditionally been gathered through theme-based collections around different elections. This year the collection covered social media contents from Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube in addition to traditional online sources. The materials to be archived were mapped together with researchers. This cooperation will continue when the research use of the archive materials is piloted.
By Aija Vahtola, Chief Information Specialist, the National Library of Finland
The online material related to the Finnish parliamentary elections was archived during the campaigning period, the elections, and later.
For social media, the collection covered the profile pages of candidates and parties on Twitter and Facebook as well as tweets with election-related hashtags, such as #vaalit2015 and #eduskuntavaalit. Election videos were collected on YouTube and election galleries. For websites, the collection focused on the online contents published by candidates, parties, organisations, political decision-makers, support groups and news media.
The collected materials were mapped together with researchers from the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT, which is jointly operated by the University of Helsinki and Aalto University. The cooperation will continue when the research use of the material is piloted.
Copyright legislation enables access to the online archive for reading, viewing, listening and printing only through the legal deposit workstations. The National Library is now studying and testing ways researchers can analyse the material without infringing copyright laws, e.g., through link analysis and topic modelling.
The websites archived from the election collection will be added to the online archive and released for use on the legal deposit workstations. Planning for the release of social media contents is underway.
Finnish websites (domains ending in .fi or .ax) have been collected into the online archives every year since 2006.
Finnish websites (domains ending in .fi or .ax) have been collected into the online archives every year since 2006. In addition, more material has been acquired for the online archive through themed collections related to parliamentary, presidential and European elections, etc. The collection of online material is based on the Act on Collecting and Preserving Cultural Materials (1433/2007).