Tritonia Academic Library


The Academic Library of Tritonia is a library serving the educational and research needs of five different universities in Finland. These universities include University of Vaasa, Åbo Akademi University, Vaasa University of Applied Sciences, Novia University of Applied Sciences, and Hanken School of Economics. The library has two units, located in Vaasa and Jakobstad.

History and Function

Tritonia started as an collaboration between University of Vaasa, the Vaasa branch of Åbo Akademi University, and Hanken Vaasa. The goal was to pool their educational resources in a common library that could offer the same material, both digital and otherwise, to all the students and researchers of the respective universities. The Tritonia main building was completed in 2001 and it is located in the heart of the campus of University of Vaasa. In 2010 Vaasa University of Applied Sciences and Novia University of Applied Sciences joined the collaboration and merged their libraries with Tritonia's. As of 2014 Tritonia has five locations in three cities -- three in Vaasa, one in Jakobstad, and one in Turku.
The collections in Tritonia reflect the curricula of the respective universities. In the library's collections include scientific literature on the following subjects: business, economics, education, psychology, linguistics, technology, engineering, social sciences, law, and geography. The library also has a collection of textbooks for the current courses held at the different universities. Tritonia is an academic library and was designed for the use of the respective students and researchers of its affiliate organizations, however most of the libraries collections are also open to the public. The library has also a few special collections that are only accessible through special permission, due to the collections historical and rare nature. One of the special collections is the Ekenäs Seminary Library a 19th century texts of seminars for the education Swedish speaking school teachers.
The library provides courses on information retrieval for the students and the researchers of the universities. The library also has a service called EduLab which offers education for teachers on how to use different technologies to their advantage when they teach.
The universities have their education in both Finnish and Swedish which means that Tritonia's customer service is bilingual. Due to the fact that a high number of non-native students study in the respective universities, English is also a commonly-used language.