In 2000 Elisabet Mickos, just retired from the Finnish Technical Research Centre´s (VTT) Information Service, and Marie Wallin at the Royal Institute of Technology Library (KTHB) in Stockholm got the idea to produce a book covering experiences from the pioneering years of online information retrieval. It should revive memories from persons who participated in the development of this era: information specialists or documentalists who provided researchers and other professionals with literature searches. The Nordic countries have participated significantly in the online development and in many cases been forerunners in Europe.

NORDINFO was going to celebrate its 25th anniversary in 2002. It seemed an appropriate occasion to acknowledge its central role in enabling collaboration and mutual stimulation in the field of scientific information retrieval. NORDINFO approved a project plan from Elisabet and Marie in 2001 and Teodora Oker-Blom joined the team. They managed to gather authors from all the Nordic countries, either still working or retired, and ask them to give their personal views on the online history, if possible spiced with anecdotes to make it enjoyable to read. The aim was also to describe NORDINFO´s role in online development. Unfortunately NORDINFO, the financer of these tasks and the agreed publisher of the book, was discontinued in 2004.

The 13th Nordic Conference on Information and Documentation (13th Nord IoD) was held in Stockholm in June 2007. It gave the editorial team an opportunity to present a status report of this book project on Nordic online history. To acknowledge the authors who had submitted their manuscripts by then and to distribute examples of the contents of the book at the conference, available texts were posted online in the open digital repository Helda of the University of Helsinki. The manuscripts were left in the repository with the intention to replace them soon with the final version of the book.

Due to the sudden death of our project manager and main editor Elisabet Mickos in October 2007, to the discontinuation of NORDINFO and to other unfortunate circumstances the book project was paused and the incomplete example of the book was left pending for a decade in Helda. At the beginning of 2016 the book project was revived in Finland as well as in Sweden. Lars Klasén, one of the authors, had been referring to the manuscripts in Helda in many of his lectures. He contacted us and wanted to make an effort to complete the publication. Thanks to his work we at last managed to achieve the goal and publish this book, “Online development in the Nordic countries – A history of online information from the 1960s to the ‘00s and NORDINFO’s role in its development”.

For more information, please contact:

Marie Wallin, Sweden (maw@malma.se)

Lars Klasén, Sweden (lars.klasen@outlook.com)

Teodora Oker-Blom, Finland (tokerblom@gmail.com)