Filter, Curate, Open! – Customising e-library services at a special library
Creators: name: Kaihoja, Petri
name: Rajahonka, Tytti
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2022
Subjects: Session 12: Paving the way: Digital Access &amp; Preservation
Lightning talk

description: Commonly available e-library solutions are often designed with an eye to multidisciplinary libraries with a large institutional customer base. A more specialised library may find it difficult to adapt full-text packages, supplier services and library software to local needs. In this presentation, we describe our efforts of adapting industry products to a special library environment. The Library of the Finnish Literature Society (SKS) is a special library in the fields of cultural studies and Finnish literature. Although primarily designed to meet cross-cultural researchers’ and literary scholars’ information needs, the SKS Library essentially offers services to anyone interested in the related subjects. After more than 190 years of consistent development, the collections now cover a great depth of scholarly material. Instead of investing in wide-ranging full-text packages, the SKS Library, to a large extent, sticks to selecting e-materials on a title by title basis, relying on detailed criteria and regular discussions between selectors. In the special library profession, a subject librarian’s capability to track current research and discover valuable information resources is part of the core competencies. Most of the SKS Library’s efforts to deliver information to researchers come down to selecting, filtering and curating. With our content expertise and the help of technology, we filter out vast amounts of information. At the same time, we curate content, increasing visibility and accessibility. In this respect, the continued development of SKS Finna proved to be crucial. Within the technical frame of this organisation-specific interface, customised on a national open-source platform, the Library has an opportunity to filter and curate, whether it is about separating sets of holdings from a union catalogue or about building discipline-appropriate filters into a central index of harvested metadata, or about current-awareness services. To a special library with a relatively small number of authorised users with off-site access to e-resources, removing barriers is of great importance. With a growing emphasis on open access, we strive to streamline the use of resources across and beyond institutional boundaries. Within the SKS Library’s search entity in Finna, there is a centralised index of open-access directories and repositories. However, subject description within harvested metadata is often fragmented and uneven and is therefore insufficient for the needs of a special library. Due to this, we have preferred to process open-access publications like any items acquired and integrate them into the local catalogue. A smooth search experience is achieved not only by pre-configured filtering but also by uniform subject cataloguing. Locally produced, unified metadata gives us opportunities for highlighting the growing body of open-access literature. This is particularly important for publications in Finnish because those tend to be ignored by global metadata suppliers, presumably due to a language barrier. Our principal aim is, regardless of access rights and media, to ensure retrieval coverage and give users a range of browsing options. In a special library like ours, service customisation and content expertise are prerequisites for achieving this.