De danska böckernas långa väg till Helsingfors

Resumé

The first Danish books to arrive in Finland were as Swedish spoils of war in the 17th
century. Nearly all of these were however destroyed in the Great Fire of Turku of 1827.
Only the grammar school library of Porvoo has books of older origin. Finland’s National
Library (then the University Library of Helsinki) obtained the most important
part of its present collection of older Danish literature in the form of imperial book
donations from St. Peterburg. In 1833 was added the library of the Marble Palace,
which for the most part consisted of Baron Johann Albrecht von Korff’s (1697-1766)
private library, which he had built up during over more than two decades when he was
Russian ambassador in Denmark. A further significant donation (in 1836) was Peter
van Suchtelen’s collection of European dissertations, including dissertations from the
Universities of Copenhagen and Kiel.
The donation of the Korffska library brought c. 22.000 volumes along with the corresponding
catalogues to Helsinki. Since these books lacked ownership stamps and the
library had not been kept together as a single unit, verifying which volumes originated
from Korff proved to be an extensive research task. It could however be assumed that
all publications printed before 1766 in Denmark and the duchies originate from his
library. A quite obvious case in point is the collection Miscellanea, which consists of individually
bound and numbered combined bindings containing 2,266 separate works,
and also a collection of older dissertations, around 2-3.000 in number. Thanks to the
Korffska library the Finnish National Library owns a wide range of older Danish titles,
of which some seem even to be lacking in The Royal Danish Library’s collection.
The advent of new online catalogues has meant that research on historical collections
now has new tools available to it. The retroconversion of catalogues does however
conceal a problem, which derives amongst other things from the thoroughness of the
conversion. Furthermore, retroconverted catalogues often lack authority control, a
fact which the researcher must always bear in mind.