The National Library of Finland is responsible for the diverse and representative preservation of online material. To make this work more transparent, they produced a document entitled Content selection for the Finnish Web Archive, outlining the principles for content selection in thematic and continuous web harvests. The document covers key stages of content selection, including which topics they decide to harvest, the methods they use to collect online material and how they choose collaboration partners.

Our thematic harvests are good examples of content selection, covering both current affairs and more timeless subjects. Last year, they participated in the Children and Youth Leisure Survey, which enabled them to collect YouTube and TikTok video content aimed at young people. Regional diversity was represented through a county and municipal elections harvest, alongside content relating to the 2025 Finnish baseball season and the 250th anniversary of the City of Kuopio. In terms of duration, the longest harvest, spanning the full year, centred on the transformation of Finnish security policy.

Content selection for the Finnish Web Archive feeds into the document entitled Collection plan for online material, which they prepare every four years to guide the future of web harvesting more broadly. Their latest collection plan, published last year, is valid until 2028; the content selection document will remain in effect until further notice.

They have been collecting online material since 2006, when the Finnish Copyright Act(opens a new tab) (404/1961, section 16b, available only in Finnish and Swedish) established the right to preserve material from information networks. The Act also sets out how materials may be made available at legal deposit workstations. The Act on Collecting and Preserving Cultural Materials(opens a new tab) (1443/2007, available only in Finnish and Swedish), which governs the preservation of Finnish publications, has required them to preserve Finnish online materials since 2008.