For a long time, public discussion on forests has been marked by the issue of defining limits for the economic exploitation of Finnish forests. The National Library of Finland has preserved forest-focused discussions on the internet spanning several years.
Forests have always been extremely important to Finnish society. The utilisation of forest resources has been a hot topic for some time now. Public discussion became heated once again in late summer 2024 when a logging machine drove over protected freshwater pearl mussels at Hukkajoki river, in Suomussalmi in northeastern Finland. The material preserved in the Finnish Web Archive covers several years and contains discussions ranging from the protection of the carbon stocks and biodiversity of forests to their economic exploitation, which means that the content includes the perspectives of both nature conservation and business.
The material contains entire websites and numerous online articles published by Finnish and international news media, bloggers, government agencies, forestry companies, researchers and conservation organisations. Moreover, included are videos from TikTok and YouTube as well as discussion threads from online forums, all related to the topic. Hiking and other recreational use of forests were excluded from the harvesting.
The addresses of the resources included in the harvest can be browsed in the index of the Finnish Web Archive. The resources themselves can be accessed, in accordance with the Copyright Act (https://www.finlex.fi/fi/laki/alkup/2005/20050821, in Finnish only), from designated workstations at all legal deposit libraries across Finland, at the Library of Parliament and the library of the National Audiovisual Institute. The National Library of Finland has been collecting online resources since 2006, when the Copyright Act provided for the right to archive material from data networks. The act also defines how resources can be made available at legal deposit workstations. The Act on Collecting and Preserving Cultural Materials (https://www.finlex.fi/fi/laki/ajantasa/2007/20071433, in Finnish only) governing the archiving of Finnish publications has obliged the National Library to preserve Finnish online resources since 2008.
For further information, contact Librarian Jari Heikkinen ([email protected]) or Head of Services Aija Vahtola ([email protected]).