| : Σε ευχαριστώ πάρα πολύ για την πρόσκληση να είμαι μαζί σας σήμερα. Είμαι πολύ χαρούμενος που μου δίνετε η δυνατότητα να ξαναεπισκεφτώ το πολύ όμορφο νησί σας ύστερα από περίπου 20 χρόνια. Η ημερίδα σας έχει πολύ ενδιαφέροντα θέματα και είμαι σε πολύ ευχάριστη θέση να ευχαριστώ. Είμαι σε πολύ ευχάριστη θέση να μοιραστώ μαζί σας κάποιες σκέψεις από τη φλεύρα των φιλανδικών δημοτικών βιβλιοδικών. Το καλοκαίρι του 1994 ήρθα πρώτη φορά στη Κύπρο και έμαθα τις πρώτες μου ελληνικές λέξεις αλλά με συγχωρείτε που θα πρέπει να κάνω την ομιλία μου στην αγγλική γλώσσα. Εδώ, στην πρώτη σκέψη, μπορείτε να δείτε μια φωτογραφία από την Οόλου στη νότια Φιλανδία, με την ελληνική γλώσσα πίσω στο νησί. Η φωτογραφία έκανε στις 3.30 π.μ. και είναι ήδη μακριά οπότε μπορείτε να κατανοηθείτε γιατί χρειαζόμαστε τις ελληνικές γλώσσες από την ελληνική γλώσσα πίσω στο νησί. Πρώτα θα πω λίγα λόγια σχετικά με την ελληνική γλώσσα στην Φιλανδία. Ίσως πιστεύετε γιατί υπάρχει μια ελληνική γλώσσα σχετικά με τις ελληνικές γλώσσες στην Φιλανδία. Η Φιλανδία είναι ένας από τους δύο ελληνικούς γλώσσες. Η Φιλανδία είναι ένας από τους δύο ελληνικούς γλώσσες στην Φιλανδία. Υπάρχουν περίπου 300.000 ελληνικούς γλώσσες στην Φιλανδία και since Finland has a little bit less than 6 million citizens we are about 5.5% of the population. On the map you can see the Swedish speaking areas and the names of the municipalities that are either unilingually Swedish speaking or bilingual with either Finnish or Swedish as the majority language. On the west we have the Åland Islands which are autonomous and officially unilingually Swedish. Then before we start to talk about the public libraries a few words about our association, the Finland-Swedish Library Association. There are many similarities to the Cyprus Association. We are around the same size and also of course we are a non-profit organization. We are doing volunteer work without any staff or any office. We have around 440 members of which 80 are institutions, mostly the public and academic libraries. Our association was founded in 1938. Our main task is obviously to advocate for and also to connect libraries that are working in Swedish in Finland, both public and academic libraries. One of our biggest tasks is to organize conferences for the library staff as the other library associations do. We are an active member of IFLA and EBLIDA organizations and we publish our magazine BIPAN three times every year. You can see some pictures. The association has, during the years past, worked a lot to develop essential tools for working in Swedish libraries in Finland, for instance translation of cataloging rules, thesauri and so on. The public libraries in Finland are administrated by the municipalities. By the law all the citizens of the municipalities have right to library services that are according to national standards. The libraries are administrated by the municipalities, and most of the funding comes from the government. The government funds both the normal expenses of the libraries and also there are special funds for projects for building new libraries or renovating library premises. Also for the municipalities to have mobile libraries in library buses that you will see in a while, I will show you a picture. The pictures here are from the public library of Vasa on the west coast where I live, but it's not the library where I work. Here you can see at the entrance of the library the two languages next to each other, kirjas in Finnish and bibliothek in Swedish. And on the picture on the right we have the CD collection of the library. The library doesn't only hold books and journals, also music recordings, sheet music, video games, movies and so on. And of course e-books, e-resources. I will show you some key pictures of the Finnish public libraries to give you a picture of the work they do. There are 291 main libraries. It should correspond to the number of municipalities in mainland Finland. Totally there are 487 libraries and 147 mobile libraries. A mobile library is a bus that goes around the municipality, the remote areas, where they cannot reach the normal libraries very easily. And also the mobile libraries visit schools that don't have their own school libraries. And a big part of the library work, as in other countries too, is with children. And here you can see the children's books in the library bus, and also some kind of activity. This is not how the librarians dress normally, I guess, the lady in the background of the picture. The number of loans per inhabitant is 17 per year, and of which 13 are books, so the other are the movies, CDs and so on. Around 40% of the citizens are registered as library customers, so I guess those that make the loans make more than 17. And the society spends around €59 per inhabitant per year for the public libraries. More than half of the expenses is for staffing, 55%, and only 12% for the library material, books and the other material, 20% for space, the buildings, and 13% for other expenditures. And as you can see, around 5% of the collection is renewed annually. Something very characteristic for the Finnish public libraries is the cooperation within regional library networks. Within these library networks, the services are often combined over the borders of the municipalities to form bigger networks for the patron. The services normally include the joint library system and the joint web library interface for the patron. Often it is also possible for the patron to borrow books from other parts of the region in the integrated system. So the regional library networks are networks of cooperation, but then we have also some defined provincial libraries that have been given this task from the state. And they are libraries with special responsibilities to coordinate the libraries in their area, to support the libraries in developing their services, to provide the lectures and training for the librarians in the area, and also they are responsible for collecting the cultural heritage, especially of course the literature from their specific area. The basis for the state and the development of the public libraries in Finland is of course the Library Act. The first Library Act was in 1928. The Act we have now is from 1961, but now we are in the process of renewing the Library Act to meet the new challenges of the libraries. The Minister of Education and Culture is responsible for coordinating the library policies in Finland and for coordinating the funding to the municipalities. In addition to this we have regional state administrative agencies who support the municipalities in offering the library services and also they check that the libraries and the municipalities meet the national quality standards according to the Library Act and Degree. And also these state agencies are responsible for arranging seminars for the library professionals. Here you can see in the picture the libraries.fi site, which is a nationally funded site for all the libraries, but mostly the public libraries, and there they develop many kinds of services. Here we have the e-library which is supposed to collect all the e-books that the public libraries offer, so you can find them in one place and then you can borrow them according to where you are registered as a patron. Also there is the library channel which records and puts interviews with us, radio shows and so on about libraries. And they develop services, online services for children. They have developed some games that the children can play on the site and so on. Okay, then some words about the changes or we could also say challenges. And we have the state of the public finances everywhere in Europe and also it has affected Finland. The last big crisis we have was in the 1990s, and now the scholars say that this crisis we have now in Finland is as deep as in the 1990s, but we haven't seen it yet. And in the 1990s when we had the crisis, we saw that the need of library services grow a lot, and I think you can see that in all the countries. So it's important to support the libraries in this period of course. This we are all familiar with. So far luckily we haven't seen any huge cuts on government funding for the library budgets, but the situation is getting tighter every year in the municipalities. So if someone is retired, maybe the librarian won't be replaced. Another big issue we have is the merging of the municipalities. The state wants to save money, and there is an idea that they do it if there are fewer municipalities, bigger, something like the Kallikrates reform in Greece I think. And of course this affects the library too, because the basis of the library is the municipality and the bureaucracy of the municipality. Other changes or challenges are also with e-books, and it could be a presentation of its own, but I won't go into that. I just want to mention one challenge, because I think it's something that could be a problem for both Swedish-speaking in Finland and for Cyprus, and it is when we have the negotiations between the publishers and the libraries, if they are done only for the national level, this could be the case. In Greece they could have a cooperation, but what about Cyprus? Is Cyprus there too? Yes, we are establishing a new consortium here in Cyprus also, but we are still part of the Italian consortium. We are part of the members. In Finland and also in Sweden the situation is very unsecure still, and we are afraid that we will be forgotten that there will be these national agreements, and then we won't have access to Swedish books in Finland too, which is of course essential to us as Swedish-speaking. Another trend is volunteers in the library as activating the users and using their knowledge to refine the library services. Hopefully this is a way of adding the services of the library and not a way of reducing the professional library staff. Though there are some economic challenges, there are also big library projects in Finland. In Helsinki a few years ago there was a big academic library opening, and now in a few years they will start to build the Central Public Library of Helsinki. You can see a picture of it here with the parliament in the background. The people in the library seem to be very relaxed, and here we have the idea of the library as a living room and also an open collaborative space. We have heard a lot of ideas how the libraries can develop today, and I will mention some of the hot topics in Finland. As I said, the library as a living room and not always a silent place anymore, and librarians have to know everything in order to guide the patrons, not only about books and literature anymore. Also the library is becoming more and more a place for creating and doing things. In some libraries you can come to do knitting for instance, or you can come to try a 3D printer. The different libraries are developing different models to reach out to the customers or the patrons. Also last year and this year we are talking a lot about self-service libraries as a way of increasing the accessibility of the libraries to let the citizens access the library on hours that suit them. We are hoping that it will be an additional service of the library, not a way of lowering the number of staff in the libraries. But also many small libraries in rural areas, it could be a chance instead of closing the library to make it a self-service library. The library as a guide to the digital world, we have heard examples of that already today. Here is a workstation where the patrons can come to digitize their analog media to save it for the future, their personal sound recordings, video recordings and so on. And this is something that has become quite common in public libraries in recent years. Also the libraries help the citizens with the digital world in many other ways, has helped them to use e-banking, e-government services, mobile phones, tablet computers, all these kind of devices. Another trend is the libraries trying to meet the patrons to go where the patrons are. As we also heard earlier today, here we have a bicycle library, especially in the summer it is popular to go, to bring the library to the parks, to the beach and so on. Or there could be pop-up libraries in shopping centers and so on. Also a service form we have is that if you cannot access the library, if you are old and have moving disabilities you have the right to get your books at home and a librarian will deliver the books that you need. And of course the work with children and young people is a big task for the public libraries. And in recent years we have a lot of reading promoting projects and cooperation with schools. It is one of the things that are pointed out in the Finnish Library Strategy to the cooperation between schools and the libraries. In the picture you can see in the middle a dog, it's a reading dog called Börje and he has become very popular in recent years. And the idea of the reading dog, if you haven't heard about it before, is that children with disabilities to read if they have some problems they can read to the dog and the dog is a very good listener and this helps the children to develop in their reading and expressing their feelings also. Another way of promoting reading, some projects that have taken place in recent years are the library passport in some municipalities where the children can collect stamps when they borrow a book and when they have borrowed a specific number of books, let's say 10 books, they can have a free ticket to the swimming hall. And this has been very popular among the children and they have borrowed a lot of books. Another example I have heard from the members of my board is a project with the fifth grade pupils where they could vote for the best covers of the books. And another trend is that the children make video clips, trailers about their favourite books and publish them online. Another interesting project that was done in Vasa was that the library cooperated with the local prison and they let the imprisoned fathers record goodnight stories that they are reading to their children. And this was very appreciated by the children that they could listen to their fathers but obviously they can't meet too often. Another trend in our libraries is games and video games to borrow but also to play in the library because the library has become in many places, many municipalities, a place where the young can come after school to relax or also to do their homework. And in the libraries the librarians or some volunteers can help the children with their homework. Another trend now is that some libraries start to teach the young to do computer programming or coding. It is something that is discussed also that the schools should put this on their curriculum but also the libraries talk about it because it is an important thing to understand in the future because everything is based on code these days. On our web page fsbf.fi which is also a part of the libraries.fi service we have done some video clips in cooperation with the libraries.fi service that describe some of the realities in the Swedish speaking libraries in Finland and whenever you have time you can have a look at them. They should be translated or subtitled to English too. On the picture on the upper left there is my co-worker from the library I work, Plutonia Academic Library in Vasa. We are a joint library of five universities. So we have a little bit interesting bureaucracy because we have five owners. And to the right, the upper right picture is a video clip about a library boat, the only library boat in Finland. Working as a library bus but going in the summer to the small villages in the archipelago of Pargas in southwest Finland. |
