40 years of library services in the Carelia building on the Joensuu campus, part 2

The Joensuu Campus Library of the University of Eastern Finland is located in the Carelia building, which turned forty years old in 2025. Over the decades, the library’s facilities and services have undergone changes. Now we are once again on the threshold of a new transformation: the campus development project will bring new actors into the building.

In the upcoming semester, we will celebrate the forty-year-old library space with a series of blog posts. We will also share information about the changes that will come to the facilities as part of the campus development project.

In presentable and modern facilities

The Main Library of the University of Joensuu began operating in the Carelia building in the summer of 1985. Both the customers and the library staff were provided with modern, spacious facilities. The total floor area was 5,400 square metres across three floors. The first floor housed reference works and course books. On both the second and third floors, there were two collection halls containing research literature and periodicals from various academic disciplines. Staff facilities were located on the first and second floors.

The library halls contained hundreds of reading places, and adjacent to the halls were sixteen group study rooms. The largest of these rooms were intended to be equipped for teaching purposes with overhead projectors and slide projectors. The library also had three typing rooms, a language laboratory, as well as a separate space for watching videos and television and for listening to music.

Operations in the building did not initially settle into the desired routine. In the spring of 1986, a construction-time defect was discovered in the floor surfaces of the first floor. The floor had to be replaced, which meant that the library’s first floor, including its service desks, was out of use for three months. Library services had already been somewhat restricted shortly before this due to a civil servant strike. The library premises had remained open, but for a little over a month no materials were lent out.

The initial difficulties were overcome, and the library’s first decade in the new premises became in many ways a period of growth and expansion. New degree programmes were established at the university, and student admissions were increased. At the same time, the number of library users, loan statistics, and the collections grew rapidly. Furnishing the facilities and developing the services continued for years — the work was not completed all at once.

Information technology was making its way into libraries. At the University of Joensuu Library, computerisation in various work tasks had begun already in the 1970s, first in the cataloguing of materials. The first library system to cover circulation, acquisitions, and cataloguing—VTLS—was introduced in 1991. Until then, information about the publications acquired by the library had been browsable on microfiche, but now customers could search the collections using computer terminals. One step toward self-service was the self-check machine, ceremoniously taken into use in 1993.

The university was eager to showcase the Carelia building to both domestic and international visitors. Presidents of Finland Mauno Koivisto and Martti Ahtisaari each visited the university during their regional tours, and on those occasions the programme also included a tour of the library. In the 1990s, the building was visited by, among others, the ambassadors of the Federal Republic of Germany and Hungary, and in 2001 the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Igor Ivanov, toured the library. The expansion of theological education also brought ecclesiastical visitors, such as the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew in 1995.

The collections of the University of Joensuu Main Library grew, and the shelves in the reading rooms filled up. As operations expanded, space challenges emerged faster than anticipated. We will discuss this further in the next part of the series.

Sources:

Joensuun yliopiston kirjasto 30 vuotta: Joensuun yliopiston kirjaston 30-vuotisjuhlajulkaisu. Joensuun yliopiston kirjasto 2000.

Minutes of the Board Meetings of the University of Joensuu Library, 1985–1990.

Annual Reports of the University of Joensuu Library, 1985–1993.

Mikko Meriläinen, information specialist
Riitta Porkka, head of services
Collection services

Part 1: Library facilities to the university’s new main building