Nokia is also a battlefield where a large peasant uprising was quelled during the so-called Cudgel War in 1596. The word Nokia has therefore a dual ring and we can only hope that its modern aspect will be associated with a purely positive dimension. Finland is a country where almost every family has at least one mobilephone and the rate of Internet-connections is among the highest in the world. The question whether Finnish information networks are still filled with emptiness has been raised, partly with good reason. Electronic networking has been a very fast process and the contents of the networks are not in parity with the technical abilities of the population to use the new tools.
Information is still predominantly available on paper.
The project offers funding for digitization of vital parts of the national heritage and later use in electronic form. The University of Tampere is the only institution of its kind in Finland which offers archival education on an academic level. The Finnish Parliament will, after a few weeks, probably in December, pass a law which allows purely electronic transactions between citizens and state authorities, without any paper. The handwritten signature will be replaced by a so-called digital signature, an identity card which will be fed into a reader for the time the document is written. The carriage will, so to say, be put before the horse.