Contracts Enabling Collaboration of The National Library of Finland with Media Houses in Electronic Deposit

Abstract

There is legal deposit for analogue newspaper materials in Finland. The electronic deposit of newspapers is based on contracts and collaboration with media houses at the moment. The National Library has been focusing on receiving the newspapers in electronic format and has built the technology for deposit, launched in 2013.

The media field is in turmoil and the media houses are interested in collaboration with the Library for various reasons: ensuring the proper long-term preservation for their materials, digitising their historical newspapers and creating new business models. The Library can provide access to digitised or born-digital newspapers either via its interface or via raw data.

Many of the media houses in Finland have a poor archival coverage, especially of their early electronic materials. The Library on the other hand, has had the legal deposit for centuries and has an excellent coverage of the published newspapers in Finland since 1771.

Contracts enable wider use of the digital materials than the current law. Negotiating with news media houses requires proper understanding of legal issues, especially in copyright and data privacy, and business skills. Close cooperation with the national copyright organisation is also needed.

The Finnish collection of digital newspapers and journals is available online until 1910 (http://digi.kansalliskirjasto.fi), over 10 million pages altogether. They include the old digitised newspapers as well as the electronically deposited papers all in the same user interface. The materials under copyright are available in the six legal deposit libraries all over Finland. There is a pilot in the Mikkeli region, where two newspapers until 2013 are in use in e.g. schools, community college, libraries and research organisations in 2016 - 17. This pilot will help in applying the model to other regions or nationally.