Anna-Maria Soininvaara is director of Helsinki Central Library Oodi since 2018 and during the 2022 edition of Readmagine participated in two sessions of the conference: in the first one she focused on her experience in Oodi -the emblematic Helsinki library project- for an audience of Spanish librarians and in the second one she shared the floor with the perspective of the new business models linked with the SDG of the 2030 Agenda of UN.
From the point of view of UN 17 Sustainable Goals, in Oodi they have focused on the following goals
4: Equitable education
10: Reduce inequalities
12: Responsible consumption
13: Climate action
16: Peace, justice, strong institutions
You can see the presentation by Soininvaara in this video. Her intervention was structured with the following points:
4: Equitable education
All libraries support literacy programs, provide a safe space for learning. Soininvaara said that in Helsinki City Library they have a good program for schools and kindergartens, where they visit libraries regularly.
The new target groups are elderly people, immigrants with no Finnish skills, people with no access to web and mobile services (many of those are common groups), by organising senior peer learning clubs in ict-skills, language cafes and digital guidance with computers.
10: Reduce inequalities
In this field the most important programmes are related to equitable access to information, freedom of expression, freedom of association and assembly, and privacy are central to individuals’ Independence.
This programmes in the library are focused to lifeline to marginalised groups, who may struggle to access information, skills or support elsewhere with the aim of foster community engagement and citizen participation. She admitted that library’s values such as freedom of expression and equality are sometimes in conflict with each other and from this point of view, during the pandemic they met problems with aggressive anti-vaccine and anti-covid demonstrators. When this situation got easier, the library met the propaganda according the Russian aggressive war in Ukraine.
But she considers that is it still important to keep all the propaganda materials on shelves in the name of freedom of expression.
12: Responsible consumption
Her statement was that libraries are the precursors of the new sharing economy, offering all kinds of materials for loan (not only books, music, movies, and all kinds of information resources, but also tools, musical instruments, appliances, and more), thus reducing the carbon footprint.
13: Climate action
Libraries provide public access to information about climate change and help raise awareness about the critical and urgent need to protect our environment and to work together to mitigate and adapt to the effects of climate change. Oodi is planned and built as energy efficient and carbon neutral as possible. Still we have much to do, and we must always examine our operations thoroughly.
16: Peace, justice, strong institutions
These times we need more awareness of mis/disinformation and skills for media literacy.
On this spring Helsinki City Library organized a study of how people retrieve information and which is the library’s role there. Libraries were very much trusted to share reliable information, but not many used it’s information services to ask about covid19 or vaccines or Ukraine war. In this regard Oodi organized some fact checking events, but we must do a lot more.
Soininvaara has developed a long career before become director of Oodi. In fact, her former position for 14 years was deputy library director and in this position she was in charge of the planning process of the building of a new central library. Other tasks were related to library administration, developing library services and library’s collections.
