Cultural materials and legal deposit
The Turku University Library is one of Finland's six legal deposit libraries.
In 1919, even before it was officially established, the library was granted the right to receive legal deposit copies of all publications printed in Finland. As a result, the Volter database provides access to an extensive collection of Finnish publications that are not collected or permanently preserved by most other libraries.
Approximately 300 shelf meters of new printed cultural materials are acquired annually. In total, the collection comprises approximately 900,000 books, 420,000 annual volumes of periodicals, 16,000 maps, 30,000 sheet music publications, two shelf-kilometers of newspapers stored in vertical racks, and 4.5 million primarily uncatalogued ephemera.
The Act on Deposit and Preservation of Cultural Materials, in effect since 2008, also guarantees the Library electronic legal deposit copies, but at the same time, the Turku University Library lost its legal deposit right to printed newspapers, meaning that its holdings of these publications end with the 2007 volumes.
There is also a fairly comprehensive collection of Finnish cultural materials from the period preceding the legal deposit right. Most of these have been acquired through donations from private individuals, organizations, and other libraries.
By law, the Library's legal deposit collections are available to everyone, but the law also requires that it be carefully preserved. For this reason, part of the legal deposit collection is available for use only on the Library's premises.
Electronic legal deposit materials are available to everyone at the Library’s cultural materials workstation.
You can search for and request legal deposit materials through the Volter database.
Not all legal deposit materials are currently searchable in Volter. This applies, for example, to much of the Library's ephemera, sheet music and map collections. Due to varying cataloguing practices over time, Volter still lacks location and availability information for many books and periodicals published before 1979. If you are unsure whether a particular item is available, please contact our customer service or email kirjasto@utu.fi. By doing so, you will also help us improve Volter's records.
Legal deposit copies are distributed by the National Library to Finland's legal deposit libraries several times a year. If you are looking for a recently published item, you may need to wait until it has been received and processed. The Library cannot influence when legal deposit copies are received.