Plan of action: The 35th branch of Helsinki City Library, called the Cable Book, explores the new possibilities for the library created by the new information technology.
The Cable Book's users come from all parts of the capital-area, most of them work at, or visit the Cable Factory. We have about 100 visitors each day, most of them aged between 25 and 35. An average visit in the Cable Book lasts longer than in othet public libraries, approximately over one hour. The library is open five days a week, closed on Fridays and Saturdays.
The book-collection is not broad, approx. 4000-5000 volumes, and it's not meant to grow, the idea is to sustain a living collection that changes with the time and trends. The number of loans is also small, but on the other hand the Cable Book is planned to be a library you want to stay and read in with old sofas and armchairs. The collection concentrates on culture and art trends of the 90's. Comic strips are an important part of the collections. We also have travel books, philosophy, history e.t.c. The traditional library is present in the poetry-corner where our aim is to get a representative collection of Finnish poetry. A remarkable part of the book collection is acquired from other libraries.
We order about one hundred newspapers and magazines and in addition we buy single numbers of other magazines to complement the collection. The magazines represent culture, art and different journals of opinion. The older issues are also for lending.
The Cable Book has started three cooperation projects, of which the Knot at the Cable is one. The second project is about video archives and the third is a collection of comics.
Our video-project companion is AV-Arkki, which is also based in the Cable Factory. AV-Arkki is a center for the distribution of Finnish media- and video-art. By an agreement with the video-artists AV-Arkki has brought their videos to the Cable Book for everyone to see. For this purpose we have reserved a separate video-corner. In the corner you also have access to about thirty international TV-channels.
In the Comics field we cooperate with the Finnish Comics Association. To begin with the Society has moved their collections of comic books and magazines to the Cable Book, where they are available to all our patrons.
The Cable book has both PC-based and by Philips developed CD-I (interactive) CD-ROMs. Both are to be used in the library but not for lending. We have a couple dozens of CD-ROMs, which are chosen to replace books, like encyclopedias and Cinemania.
The computer equipment is partly bought and partly acquired with sponsor support (Hewlett-Packard). The Cable book offers its visitors four microcomputers (PCs), which all are connected to Internet and of which three have CD-ROM stations.
At the Cable book the visitors can also scan pictures and print them on a black and white or a colour printer. Half of the Philips CD-I equipment is sponsored by Philips. In addition the personnel have their own equipment. (A goal in the future is to aquire software for word-processing, spread-sheet computing and desktop publishing for all workstations.
Worth mentioning are also the different programs and exhibitions arranged in the Cable Book. We have had CD-ROM evenings, Internet-events, poetry clubs, Comics festivals and meetings of various organizations. In addition, we have arranged beginner's courses for Internet-users in the Library during its non-opening hours. The Library is open for the public from 12 pm to 20 pm every day except on Fridays and Saturdays.
The "cooperative information society" Katto-Meny was founded in October 1992 by a number of (mostly) Finnish cultural, educational, ecological etc. associations and individuals.
The name Katto-Meny is originally an acronym for "KAnsalaisjärjestöjen TietoTOimisto" (in Finnish) and "MEdborgarorganisationernas NYhetsbyrå" (in Swedish). In English, this means "information bureau of civic associations", or "news agency of the non-governmental organisations (NGOs)". Katto-Meny thus expresses a movement among net-connected NGOs to build their own news, information, and communication facilities by means of computer-mediated communication; an information infrastructure of the civil society. Several of Katto-Meny's member organisations use the global networks of the APC (Peacenet, Econet, Greennet, NordNet, GlasNet etc.).
The growth and integration of the computer network in the post-cold-war era, (the above mentioned APC-networks, for instance, are nowadays parts or "nodes" of the Internet), and the advent of the World Wide Web-service in the Internet, actualized a broadening of the original vision. The members of Katto-Meny now think of the Net as an extension of the whole public sphere. This, of course, includes much more than news and entertainment (i.e. TV and other present-day mass-media): the public sphere also encompasses science, art and literature, politics, philosophy etc. As "public information producers", many of the ca 70 associations and organisations and of the ca 30 individuals who form the "cooperative information society" (number are from September 1994), welcomed the joint pilot project with Helsinki City Library with enthusiasm.
The role of Katto-Meny in the project is to
It is doubtful if the project would have been started at all without the availability of free, yet sufficiently reliable, software (Linux, NCSA Mosaic, CERN httpd).
Another important precondition for the project was the availability of reasonably-priced Internet-services outside the academic network. This happened when EUnet Finland started to provide Internet-services on a commercial basis in 1993.
The Internet
During 1994 the "network of networks" has been widely publicized in the general press. The first Internet-guides in Finnish have also appeared this year. The Internet-related literature in English is growing rapidly; if a single book is to be recommended, our choice falls on Ed Krol's "The Whole Internet-User's Guide & Catalog" (O'Reilly & Ass. Inc., USA 1994).
Linux,
a Unix-like operating-system for microcomputers, was originally conceived by Finnish computer science student Linus Torvalds, who decided to define his copyrights in accordance with the GNU Public License. (Since 1985, lots of high-quality free software has been developed by the GNU project.) Version 1.0, the first "official" version of Linux, was made public 30 March, 1994 (thus two days after the opening of the Knot at the Cable). Thousands of computer students and researchers have contributed to the development of Linux - over Internet.
The so called Slackware, a package containing the whole Linux system, is freely available for downloading at several academic Internet-sites. Linux can also be purchased from a number of firms who have published CDROM editions.
Besides being gratis, the usefulness of Linux in the project of networking the library stems from its excellent multitasking capabilities. The server-machine of the Knot at the Cable is a Linux-PC (an ordinary 486-processor PC running the Linux system).
World Wide Web,
an information system created by Tim Berners-Lee and others at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN), enables a network-user to publish his/her information as hypertext. This means that the "pages" (documents) of the WWW may contain links to other "pages" anywhere on the Net. Datafiles with pictures, or with sound, may also be linked to the pages of WWW.
In order to browse (read) the WWW-pages, the user (reader) needs a "browser", also known as client-software (NCSA Mosaic, Lynx or others). The writing and editing of the hypertext pages is done with usual text-editors or wordprocessors, or with special editing tools which have been designed for the purpose. In order to add pictures and sound the WWW-publisher will possibly need a scanner and sound equipment as well.
Mosaic,
the standard graphical client-software for the browsing (reading) of the World Wide Web, was developed at the National Center for Supercomputer Application (NCSA). NCSA Mosaic exists in different versions for MS-Windows, Unix/X-Window System and the Macintosh.
In the library, NCSA Mosaic is used in all three MS-Windows-computers and in the Unix/Linux machines as well. Mosaic is the computer program which the visitor or the librarian actually sees "at work" while he/she moves about the information resources of the Internet.