Helsinki City Museum opens more collections online

Helsinki City Museum’s collections are now more widely available online for everyone interested in Helsinki and its history. Helsinki City Museum’s renewed Finna website has nearly 100,000 items, photographs, artworks and buildings that help you explore the history of Helsinki and its residents.
Two boys standing on a barbed wire fence between yards in Torkkelinmäki, Kallio district, 1970. 
 Photo: Simo Rista / Helsingin kaupunginmuseo
Two boys standing on a barbed wire fence between yards in Torkkelinmäki, Kallio district, 1970. Photo: Simo Rista / Helsingin kaupunginmuseo

The Finna website allows you to browse treasures from plastic bags to hairdryers and travel tickets to artworks or look up information about the history of buildings in Helsinki. Helsinki City Museum’s online collections contain more than 15,500 artefacts, 6,000 pieces of archive material, 2,000 buildings, 2,300 artworks and 68,000 photographs.

Among other things, all photos belonging to Helsinki City Museum’s collections that are part of the A Glimpse of Helsinki – Volker von Bonin’s photos exhibition, currently at Villa Hakasalmi, are available online. In addition, you can find some classics, such as Signe Brander’s iconic Helsinki photos, colour photos from the nearly sold-out Helsinki väreissä photography book and Elanto’s nostalgic collection. Finna also has plenty of pieces and collections not currently included in an exhibition or elsewhere.  

Finna is the home of Finnish cultural and science-related materials. Finna.fi gathers together materials from hundreds of museums, libraries and archives to make it easy and quick to browse them. Helsinki City Museum’s own Finna page is available at hkm.finna.fi. Helsinki City Museum has received a special grant from the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture to publish cultural environment materials on Finna.