On March 2nd 2026, the Library Navigator went live across the Kyyti library network: seven municipalities, 18 branches, 165,000 residents in southeastern Finland. Patrons can now receive recommendations for books, films, and music based on their loan history, ask library questions in their own language, and do it all at 2am on a Sunday if that’s when the mood strikes.
This post is about how we got here.
Built with a real library from day one
We developed the Navigator with Kyyti as a partner from the start. The first version, a helpdesk chatbot, launched in March 2025, and Kyyti patrons and librarians told us what worked. Librarians ran hands-on testing sessions and flagged confusing conversation flows or question types we hadn’t anticipated.
That kind of blunt, practical feedback is something internal QA can’t replicate, and it steered most of our decisions during the year. Mikko Vainio, Library Director at Kotka, backed the project from the beginning and helped us with the institutional side as well as practical choices such as the AI’s tone of voice.
“I believe AI will free us up to focus more on meaningful work.”
Mikko Vainio, Library Director at Kotka
Over the course of 2025, the helpdesk handled roughly 4,800 patron conversations without requiring staff intervention. That track record gave us, and the library, the confidence to go further.
The recommendation engine and the long tail
The headline feature of the Navigator is the book recommendation system, which took a year of development. When a patron grants permission, the system reads their loan history and identifies patterns of taste rather than genre labels alone. It can tell the difference between “I liked that thriller” and “I want something with the same atmosphere but faster paced”, and that nuance is where it earns its keep.
The real value sits in the long tail: the thousands of titles in a library collection that rarely surface through catalogue browsing or bestseller lists. New releases sell themselves, and the hold queues prove it. The Navigator is good at surfacing an award winner from a decade ago that fits a patron’s taste and happens to be on the shelf right now, no queue. Where a traditional recommendation engine optimises for popularity, the Navigator optimises for fit, so the collection works harder and patrons leave with something they didn’t know they wanted. (Read more on the Navigator product page.)
Pekka Väisänen, a library automation expert with decades of experience in Finnish library systems, sees the technical integration as the significant part:
“What makes this interesting is the depth of the ILS integration. The Navigator reads loan histories and checks real-time availability by connecting directly with Koha and Finna. That kind of deep connection between AI and library infrastructure is genuinely new territory for libraries.”
Pekka Väisänen, library automation expert
GDPR took time, and it was worth it
No one had done this before in Finland, or anywhere in the EU. An AI system that processes patron loan histories to make personalised recommendations raises legitimate questions, and we heard every one of them.
The conversations with Data Protection Officers were thorough and sometimes lengthy. We worked through a wide range of scenarios: which data points count as PII, how to support audit trails for security incident detection, conversation logging with a fixed retention window, or no conversation storage at all. For each scenario we found a technical solution that satisfies the requirements, so the system can now be configured to match whichever privacy posture the municipalities’ DPO agrees on.
What patrons are saying
The first days have been encouraging. Many patrons tried the loan history analysis for the first time, and through the feedback form and the thumbs-up/thumbs-down system built into the interface we’re hearing things like:
“Feels like magic.”
“It found themes and patterns in my loan history that I would have never found out myself!”
That second one describes exactly what we designed for. The Navigator reads across a patron’s whole borrowing history and finds connections that aren’t obvious on the surface. A reader who borrows Nordic noir alongside cosy fiction and Japanese culture guides has a layered taste, and the system recommends accordingly instead of treating each genre as a separate bucket.
Always on, in every language
The Navigator works around the clock without staff coverage, which matters for libraries that can’t resource chat support and for residents who are more comfortable in a language other than Finnish.
Patrons can ask in Finnish, English, Swedish, Sámi, Somali, Ukrainian, and dozens of other languages, and get responses in the same language. There is no separate English version to maintain and no language menu to navigate: the Navigator uses the browser language as a starting point and simply follows the conversation from there. For communities with new residents, or for anyone who thinks more clearly in their first language, this removes a real barrier. (Read more on the Navigator product page.)
What’s next
The Navigator is live, but we’re still building. The roadmap is shaped by what we hear from Kyyti’s patrons and staff, and from the libraries that join next.
“Kyyti taught us how to build this properly, with real patrons and real privacy constraints. We’re proud of what came out of that year, and every new partner gets to start from where we finished.”
Andrea Balzarini, Biblioworks.ai
If you’re a library director curious about what this could look like for your network, we’d welcome the conversation.
Book a 30-minute demo and we’ll show you the Navigator working with real library data.
Or try it yourself at kyyti.finna.fi — the Navigator is the chat icon in the bottom right corner.
The Library Navigator is built by Biblioworks.ai, a Finland-based team specialising in AI for public libraries. Read more about the Library Navigator. Read more about the launch on the Kyyti library blog and the Kotka city website.