30.1.2025

The Ministry of Education and Culture has granted the Theatre Museum €40,000 for digitizing its photo collection and publishing it in Finna. The project, starting in spring 2025, will involve organizing, cataloguing, and digitizing performance and role photographs from the museum’s photo collection. In addition to the ministry, the project is supported by the Niilo Helander Foundation.

Finna.fi is a search service that brings together materials from hundreds of Finnish institutions under one roof. The Theatre Museum’s integration with Finna is made possible by a new collection management system, Yksa, developed by Disec Oy and introduced last autumn. The system, configured for the Theatre Museum, has been named Spotti (after spotlight, that is called spotti or spottivalo in Finnish).

Through Spotti, the Theatre Museum manages its collections: objects, archival materials, photographs, moving images, sound recordings, and books. The system also records acquisition details. The customer interface of Spotti can be accessed in the museum’s research room.

The new system has introduced several technical improvements to collection management. For example, Spotti enables the handling of loans, reservations, exhibition use, and maintenance actions. A key feature is the ability to use more versatile hierarchical cataloguing.

The next step in developing the Theatre Museum’s information management and services is to define the Finna connection in Spotti, planned for implementation later this year. Publishing in Finna is part of the Theatre Museum’s national responsibility as a specialist museum and ensures equal access to performing arts materials across Finland.

The Theatre Museum maintains a nationally significant photo collection of performing arts, spanning from the 19th century to the 2020s. Photographs are among the most requested materials in the museum’s research services, and the museum is delighted to join Finna through this project and make its first photo collection openly searchable.

Photographs play a crucial role in preserving the cultural heritage of performing arts. Documentation of performances has evolved from individual role portraits to stage photographs and gradually to capturing entire performance situations. The photos digitized in this project form a unique resource for preserving and studying the history of performing arts in Finland.

The collection to be digitized includes, for example, role portraits from the Finnish Theatre (now the Finnish National Theatre) dating back to the late 19th century. From the early decades of the 20th century onward, role and performance photographs come from numerous theatres, including those in Tampere, Turku, Pori, Joensuu, Lappeenranta, Mikkeli, Kotka, Lahti, Kuopio, Oulu, and Rovaniemi.

Publishing in Finna creates opportunities for research, journalism, and industry publications and supports performing arts education and cultural heritage teaching in schools and universities. It also significantly improves other memory organizations’ ability to utilize the museum’s materials.