About

The National Archives of Finland

The National Archives of Finland is responsible for keeping and maintaining documents important for national cultural heritage, and documents of government authorities. The National Archives also furthers the maintaining of private archives important for national cultural heritage by collaborating with private archive holders and by acquiring these type of documents into permanent keeping.
In addition to keeping and maintaining documents, The National Archives is furthering the accessibility, usage, and research of the documents in its permanent keeping.
The National Archives is the expert authority of archival function in Finland and it provides expertise services on heraldry.

READ

READ (Recognition and Enrichment of Archival Documents) is an e-infrastructure project that is a part of European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. The project is a collaboration between 14 European archives, universities, and research institutes.
READ project has developed a research platform, Transkribus, that enables, for an example, both diplomatic and commented transcription of digitized documents, layout analysis, key word spotting, and automated handwritten text recognition.
The project is ending in June of 2019, but the support and development of Transkribus and its services will continue with READ-COOP, which will be a European Cooperative Service (SCE).

Making a Modern Archive

Making a Modern Archive project aims to implement the technologies developed in the READ project into The National Archives’ digital infrastructure, and to create a sustainable workflow for handwritten text recognition in The National Archives.
The project’s objective is also to process the registration records of the renovated court records from the 19th century into a computer-readable form. After this, the registration records will be keyword-searchable in The National Archives’ new user interface.
The project received funding from the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture.

People of the Project

Maria Kallio works at the National Archives as a Senior Research Officer. She is the project manager of MaMA and is responsible for coordinating the READ -project at NAF.

Tomi Ahoranta, Development Manager, has worked at the National Archives of Finland since 2003 in information service, recognizability-related work, research, and development. He likes to think that the primary goal of all previous generations of archivists has been getting the information into the archives, whereas the primary goal of this generation should be getting it out and into people’s everyday use.

Ville-Pekka Kääriäinen works as a researcher at National Archives of Finland and started at the READ -project in February 2019. Ville’s area of expertise is the history of 17th century Sweden (i.e. Finland). He is also a postgraduate student at University of Helsinki. In his doctoral thesis, he examines how state-building process proceeded in the peripheral area of Northern Savonia (Pohjois-Savo).

Hanna Strandberg joined the READ -project in March 2019 as a researcher. She has previously worked as an archivist with topics like digitalization, open access and collection work. Hanna has a master’s degree from Åbo Akademi University in Turku, where she studied ethnology, information science and history.

Sampo Viiri works as a researcher at the National Archives since April 2019. Previously he has worked in different positions in the Finnish public sector. Sampo has a Master's degree from the University of Jyväskylä, majoring in history and records management. He is especially interested in how digital tools may revolutionize history research and the availability of cultural heritage.

Kaisa Luhta joined the READ -project in May 2018 as an intern, and continued in the project as a research assistant after the internship. Kaisa is a MA student in the University of Turku, majoring in cultural history.