Automated Retrieval and Analysis of Finnish Cultural Metadata with finna

Cultural metadata is essential in making cultural heritage resources discoverable, accessible, and understandable. However, such metadata is often difficult to access and reuse due to its heterogeneous structure and scattered sources. Cultural heritage metadata usually contains structured information on art, literature, music, and scientific collections. It serves as a powerful research object for understanding trends, representations, and societal impacts over time. Despite the growing availability of such datasets, there remains a lack of targeted computational tools and workflows to integrate them into analytical environments. Finna is a national search platform developed by the Finnish Ministry of Culture and Education that provides unified access to millions of metadata records from Finnish libraries, museums, and archives. We introduce the finna R package, which provides a seamless interface to these services and bridges the gap between accessible cultural metadata and its computational analysis. The package allows researchers to query, retrieve, and clean Finnish cultural heritage metadata programmatically, automate workflows, and integrate the results into R for visualization and further analysis.