Finding Lordi – a dive into electronic cultural materials
Finnish digital publications and online materials stored by the National Library of Finland are available at the University of Eastern Finland’s campus libraries, on the legal deposit workstations. These workstations are presented in the article Legal deposit workstations – a pathway to electronic cultural materials.
In the following article, we will take a closer look at the materials the workstations provide access to. We are going to see how Lordi’s win in the Eurovision Song Contest was received in 2006. You can enlarge the attached images by clicking them.
Radio and TV Archive (Ritva database)
We want to watch the 2006 final of the Eurovision Song Contest. The broadcast cannot be viewed in its entirety in Yle’s (Finnish Broadcasting Company) online services Areena and Living Archive.
We go to the Radio and TV Archive from the main menu of the legal deposit workstation.
Yle’s broadcast can be found in the Ritva database using the search terms “euroviisut” (a Finnish word for the Eurovision Song Contest) and “2006”. The programme, more than three hours long, “Eurovision 2006: Finaali – Ateena”, was broadcast between 20 and 21 May 2006.
You can replay the broadcast at any point on the timeline.
Lordi’s winning performance
Digital collections (Digi)
What did Finnish newspapers and magazines write about Lordi’s win? Let’s go see newspaper and magazine material digitised by the National Library of Finland.
When we limit the list of serial publications to 2006, we see that not many newspapers or magazines have yet been digitised for that period. We can still find some titles.
Using the search terms “Lordi” and “euroviisut” and limiting the search to 2006 produce nearly two hundred hits.
There are Lordi stories in both magazines and newspapers.
You can read the magazines in your browser. The used keywords are highlighted in the text.
You can also open the magazine for reading in Adobe Acrobat Reader.
The further we go into the past, the more digitised newspapers and magazines can be found. On the other hand, there are also many of them from recent years in Digi.
Thanks to the Tutkain project, university personnel and students can also use Digi materials from their own devices through Haka login. In this case, they cannot access the most recent volumes.
You can examine press articles from 2006 more extensively from microfilm or printed newspapers and magazines, or via the publication’s own digital archives subject to a fee. You can also find online magazines in the Finnish Web Archive.
Finnish Web Archive
What was written on the Internet – online magazines, websites, online forums – about Lordi’s performance in Eurovision? Websites published in 2006 are often no longer available on the Internet openly, at least not in their original format. However, old web pages have been stored in the Finnish Web Archive maintained by the National Library of Finland since 2006.
The search terms “Lordi” and “euroviisut” yield eight videos and more than 140,000 websites.
Looks like the Web Archive search also finds Finnish tweets.
Some of the websites listed in the search are pages in the Bassoradio forum.
If you try to open links to the website on the current Internet, the server or page may no longer be found. This is also the case with the Bassoradio forum.
However, you can still view the Lordi discussions in the forum in the Web Archive.
You can also search for pages stored in the Web Archive with a URL address if you know or can guess it. Lordi’s official website is available at www.lordi.fi.
The captures of Lordi’s website do not actually go all the way back to their Eurovision win in May. Unfortunately, the same applies to online newspapers such as www.hs.fi.
Still, this is how the front page of www.lordi.fi looked like in July 2006.
Links to the Monsterboard forum on the Lordi website currently give “ERROR 666”.
In the Web Archive, however, the forum pages have been stored and are accessible.
The Web Archive did produce an extensive thematic harvesting on the Eurovision Song Contest in Helsinki in 2007.
Digital legal deposit materials (Varia)
We have yet to visit the Varia database in which the National Library of Finland has collected both electronic legal deposit copies delivered by publishers and material it has digitised by itself and whose copyright is valid.
The search terms “Lordi” and “euroviisut” yield more than two hundred references in Varia.
These include some numbers of the newspaper Salon Seudun Sanomat. They have not been digitised by the National Library like the newspapers and magazines in the Digi database. Instead, the files have been disclosed as legal deposit copies by publishers.
Varia also has legal deposit copies of e-books and music recordings as well as digital Aku Ankka (Donald Duck) magazines. In the early May 2007, a Lordi-themed comic was published in Aku Ankka.
Conclusion
Although the materials presented above can only be read at the legal deposit workstations, you can search them from your home computer. The Ritva database directory is open to everyone. Similarly, the Digi newspaper and magazine list can be browsed openly, and even content from the period before 1940 – partly even after that – is open to everyone. You can also search the Web Archive directory from anywhere.
The Varia search interface alone can only be accessed from the legal deposit workstations. However, Varia’s titles can be searched in UEF Primo and Finna, which both contain fairly comprehensive lists.
Mikko Meriläinen, information specialist
Collection services