Towards a More Advanced Loaning and Reading Culture. A Study, Based on Digital Material, of Contemporary Finnish Loaning and Reading Habits

The project explores contemporary Finnish loaning and reading culture and its information service systems by data collected by Vantaa City Library. This systematically collected and digitally preserved data offers information of several thousands of people's loaning behavior and a total of 17 million events per year. In the project, this huge data will be dealt with in three different ways:
- the project asks what kind of picture of contemporary Finnish loaning and reading culture the data at issue mediates. The loaners will be categorized and trends within and over categories are explored.
- the project clears up in what way present-day Finnish public libraries' information services function and how they can be elaborated upon.
- the project develops methods by which scholars can analyze and interpret the huge and mainly quantitative data that concerns public libraries' loan activities.

We may say that this goal forms our project's methodological aim. On a more abstract level or on meta-level the entire project wishes to show how large digital material, new computational methods and literature-sociological research questions can be integrated into the study of contemporary literary culture.

The project is a consortium consisting of literary sociologists and literary scientists (University of Eastern Finland), experts of technology (The Technical Research Centre of Finland) and scholars of computational science (Åbo Akademi University). The project is funded by Academy of Finland.