Photography and scanning of material

You can photograph public and, within certain limits, confidential documents stored in the National Archives, if you have a valid access right.

If you want to use the scanner, you must always ask for permission from the reading room staff.

If you wish, you can also request copies of documents for a fee. The price is determined according to the Decree set out by the Ministry of Education and Culture.

Materials that you are not allowed to photograph

  • Church registers younger than one hundred years and vehicle register data included in the archive of the Finnish Vehicle Administration (subseries of the Bd and Ta series). You can photograph data from other personal data files, such as census lists, that are less than a hundred years old for your own use, if you do not photograph the data files as a whole.
  • Archive materials transferred to the Digital Archive of the National Archives on the basis of archive cooperation agreements between the National Archives and different archives in Russia. No copies are available of these.
  • Archive data transferred to the Digital Archive of the National Archives on the basis of an archive cooperation agreement between the National Archives and the National Archive of Sweden (tax rolls of Tornio and Kemi Lapland from 1702–1809)
  • A document contained in a private archive, the photography of which is expressly prohibited in the handover agreement
  • Copyrighted document
Please note that the use of USB memory cards and sticks in the National Archives’ customer terminals is technically prohibited to ensure data security.