Interview with Dr. Jussi Nuorteva, Director General of the National Archives of Finnland

The FR used the ECA2010 to have a little chat with Mr. Nuorteva about the archival und scientific world and how the could better work together.

Jürg: What is your role at the ECA2010, Mr. Nuorteva?

J. Nuorteva: I‘m a member of the scientific committee. I already participated in the 7th conference in Poland. Andreas Kellerhals volunteered there to host the next conference and asked me to participate in it.

Im more coming from the sciences than from the archives and I have good connections to the scientific world and their funding committees. I‘m convinced that we should cooperate more between the sciences and archivists. The scientific world has a lot of resources and know how that could be very interesting for a conference like this. Of course the archivists have a lot of know how too, they can contribute a lot to the data sciences. So they can learn a lot from each other. We should also share our resources. If somebody has already a solution for a given problem, you don‘t want to invent it again. And especially when we talk about matters close to IT like e.g. repositories we should really cooperate!

Jürg: Do you think, that scientists are really interested in a long term archival of their work?

J. Nuorteva: Indeed they are! Especially the empirical data must be stored to validate future work. In empirical science and medicine they believe that their conclusions are very quickly outdated. But if you want to go back and validate a work, you to see the empirical data. In the past this date was stored in physical form like descriptions, lab dairies, samples etc. Now with the passage to electronic storage there is more and more a call for a repository for raw data. Also the concept of lifecycle is becoming very important. When you start to collect your data, you must also start to think about the lifecycle of the data. Scientists need standards, a common architecture to guarantee that also teams from abroad can use these files. With that kind of cooperation science can realise things like the human genome project, which was realised in cooperation with different laboratories.

Jürg: So how are they going to store all this data?

J. Nuorteva: It is here where a cooperation with archives become interesting. Archivists have a long experience in storing. But also the sciences come with good own ideas. E.g. the OAI was invented by the scientific community.

I can give you the example of Finnland, where we already combined archives and scientific computing. We have one of the biggest supercomputer centres in Europe. It collects both scientific and archival data. We get big benefits from collaborating with the research community.

Data for scientific use has always to be sampled. You have metadata models, you have to decide how you want to use the data. The scientific community is happy that they can use archivists procedures to treat their digital information (organising, indexing etc.).

In Science we are publishing more and more only digitally. They have to be able to interlink data with publications. They have a new requirements for the usage of data.
In traditional archives, when we think for who we are storing data, we think most of the time of a (prototyped) citizen. Often the usage of data is mainly for genealogist purpose. But we should think more about the future use of inter- linkable data, of what you can do if you can consult archives without to displace yourself, when you can just click and see the document in its context. I am already curious how historians will discuss this matter on their world congress this August.

Jürg: So also the humanitarian sciences can benefit a lot from this transfer to the digital?

J. Nuorteva: History is mostly written in a national perspective, using national sources. When we look at Europeana, it contains at the moment only 4.6 M objects. Almost half of them are from France. That is not much! When you look at countries like Sweden they digitise 70 M items per year. But because that access in Sweden is for the moment not for free, they are not willing to make it accessible on Europeana without getting paid for it.
So who is using Europeana for the moment? Not many! It should represent the culture of the diversity of the whole Europe. People don‘t start their search queries in Europeana. They start their searches with google and google does not often lead them there. Does a thing like Europeana then really reflect the search practices of the people?

Nobody is using Europena only because he is an European. People use always the easiest way first. If Europeana really wants to „compete“ with google it has to improve. We need to find things that are really European. I can think of a thing like heraldy for an exemple. All European cities or villages and many families have their own coat of arms. In  many countries they are already digitised. So this could be a possibility for Europeana to move into such topic, creating a standardised database of it and therefore beginnig to offer a unique, really European content.

Jürg: Thank you for this very interesting insight in those challenges. Getting back to the topic 1 of the first day, the Archival. In your opinion, on what should Young Professionals focus in their education. What kind of skills are needed in the future?

J. Nuorteva: What we are lacking is a truly European market. Cooperation on this level is still rare in European archives.

Moreover I see intellectually no difference between young and old people. There are many things that YP can do better. E.g. in Sweden the decided that everyone working on new strategy should be below 33 of age. That is wise, because young people only look forward, older every time also back.

It was a good idea, to integrate the YP in the preparation of this conference. Also for the call of paper we asked for their advice of the great themes. And we never regretted this step because we got really good and useful feedack from them.

We must also learn to give YP possibilities in an earlier stage. Archives are very hierarchical and conservative institutions. You normally do not rise because of your skill, but because of your age or experience. If you have a brilliant skill and you are young you are lacking the demanded experience. If the archives really want to proceed faster than we are doing now, we should give more opportunities to YP at earlier stage. In science they are already more often to this idea.

When you are willing to have a position you have to compete and the one with the best skills should get it. When you look at the very fast changing surrounding environment and the use of IT, many YP have an advantage over their more experienced colleagues because they use IT in a more natural way.

Jürg: Thank your very much for your time and sharing these very interesting iussues with us!