Työväenliikkeen Kirjasto

(Library of the Labour Movement)

Paasivuorenkatu 5
SF-00530 Helsinki
Tel. 358 0 766429
Fax 358 0 7535151

The Library of the Labour Movement is a scientific library financially supported by the Labour Heritage organisation. It was opened in 1987. The library's duty is to function as a special library for the history of labour and labour movement.

Library Collection

When the library was founded, the Finnish Labour Archives and the People's Archives donated their libraries almost entirely to the Library of the Labour Movement. The most important parts of the book and booklet collection are the materials of the labour movement and trade union organisations, ideological literature, biografical studies, business and cooperative movement, and working-class culture (theatre, music, sports, tradition, cultural work, press and fiction). The literature on the Finnish and Spanish civil wars, Internationals, fascism and the Finnish-American literature have many users. In addition the collection includes literature on working life, general politics and history.

There are about 110,000 monographs and 33,000 booklets in the library. The collection of periodicals, with about 4,500 titles, includes magazines published by labour movement organisations, as well as scientific periodicals. The video collection, with about 180 titles, consists of films that mainly deal with Finnish labour movement. There is also a seperate Russian collection consisting of periodicals and books in the library.

Services

The libraries donated by archives are partly catalogued. There is an alphabetical and/or a systematic card index of the collections. The material which has been purchased or recatalogued after the foundation of the library is catalogued in ADP. There are printed catalogues of some of the most important parts of the collection. These are the Internationals, cooperative movement, Spanish civil war, Finnish-American litterature and the Russian collection donated by the Finnish Labour Archives.

The accession list is published twice to four times a year, and will be sent for everyone interested. Four Työväen bibliografia-publications (Labour Bibliographies) dealing with the Finnish labour movement have resulted from the library's bibliographical work. The library feeds references of articles and studies into a national KATI- database twice a year.

Together with the archives, the library publishes the Työväentutkimus (Labour Research) periodical once or twice a year. In addition to information searches on our own collections, there is a possibility to use certain other databases, as the national bibliography and the collections of Finnish university libraries.