Digitisation is a precise craft – SLS very pleased with Grano

Many cultural heritage organisations are currently thinking about how to secure cultural heritage materials in exceptional circumstances. One such organisation is the Society of Swedish Literature in Finland (SLS), which will digitise approximately 600,000 pages of nationally significant archive material by 2026 alongside its other operations.

Securing archive material so that it remains accessible to the public and researchers is one of SLS’s core tasks. The subject has become particularly topical recently due to the unstable global situation.

The project was estimated to take three years and is subject to strict digitisation requirements. The service provider chosen to carry it out is Grano, which has garnered praise particularly for its expertise and patience in similar projects in the past.

Founded in 1885, the Society of Swedish Literature in Finland (SLS) is tasked with preserving, exploring and sharing knowledge about Finland-Swedish culture. Being a scholarly society with a long history, SLS has a massive physical archive, the digitisation of which is subject to a large number of requirements.

Digitisation Coordinator Camilla Englund from SLS praises Grano’s expertise.

“This is a major project involving hundreds of thousands of individual surfaces. Grano had the facilities, staff and know-how necessary to digitise our materials for three years on a full-time basis,” Camilla describes the scope of the project.

Digitisation speeds up information retrieval

Archivist Ilmari Sivonen also praises Grano’s expertise and stresses that the digitisation makes his daily work considerably easier.

“Working with digital material is straightforward and saves a lot of time. If the material has been appropriately digitised, specific documents are easy to find with a simple keyword search,” Ilmari explains.

Before digitisation, the amount of time needed to find a specific document in the physical archive was orders of magnitude greater.

First-class quality

When carried out correctly, digitisation ensures that documents are reliably preserved for future generations as well. Camilla emphasises that the digitisation of archive material is subject to specific quality criteria, which Grano has been able to consistently meet throughout the project.

“Grano’s staff are meticulous, adaptable and patient,” Camilla says.

Ilmari has also been pleased with Grano's work.

“Their response times have been very short whenever we have requested small corrections to already digitised materials. All of our corrections have been implemented quickly,” Ilmari says.

Camilla nods and continues:

“Our cooperation has gone smoothly. We are very pleased with Grano.”

The project involves the digitisation of the following materials, among others:

• SLS’s oldest heritage collections, which describe the life of the general public in the Swedish-speaking areas of Finland in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The material is part of UNESCO’s national Memory of the World register. No similar sets of materials exist in any other archive.
• Archives of early Finnish-Swedish modernist writers, including material written by Elmer Diktonius.
• Archive material of J.L. Runeberg and his family, including manuscripts written by the national poet and his wife Fredrika Runeberg.
• The archive of visual artist Ellen Thesleff and her family, including extensive correspondence between family members.
• Material concerning artist Albert Edelfelt and his family. The collection includes several letters from Albert Edelfelt to his sisters and son Erik. The letters describe life in Paris and Finnish politics, among other things.
• Archive material of author Sally Salminen, such as the manuscript of the novel Katrina.
• Archive of author and art historian Göran Schildt, which includes large numbers of travel photographs and films and logbooks of sailing trips on the boat Daphne.