The portal shared by the university and the city of Helsinki will be history.

In late winter, the helsinki.fi portal jointly maintained by the University and the City of Helsinki will be no more. In future, helsinki.fi will direct users straight to the university site. This means that the university will have its main page on the main domain (helsinki.fi) instead of the sub-domain (http://www.helsinki.fi/university/).

The timing is ideal for the university: many commentators have said that the city gave the university a second 375th jubilee gift, besides the metro station.

The university will renew its public webpages in stages. This is an opportunity to build our search-engine optimisation and improve URL visibility, which will help to expand the digital footprint of our research and the whole university.

The web site of the city will be available at hel.fi for now. The city has applied for the .helsinki domain and is preparing to implement in the next few years.

Continued collaboration

Though our URLs part way, we will still be working together. Visitors will be directed from one domain to the other according to topic, and the contents can be produced and published together. Such closer collaboration will help us to promote the digital visibility of Helsinki, the academic city, especially internationally.

The contents collaborations may include Helsinki as a city to study and work in, recruitment, housing and living in Helsinki, as well as communication and marketing. We already have shared concepts, like the Think Company.

The long relation between helsinki.fi and the university

The decision that the University of Helsinki will have its website at the helsibnki.fi domain was made in 1987. The city was asked for permission to use the helsinki.fi domain.

The city of Helsinki saw no problem with that. At the end of the 1980s, people thought the internet concerned only universities and research institutes – the commercialisation and other uses did not emerge until later. It was also considered probable that Finland would adopt the .edu standard for universities. This never happened.

These days, the 27-year-old digital history sees the university strongly connected to the helsinki.fi domain. Helsinki.fi has become a part of the identity of researchers and academics. It is especially partners from abroad who can find the people of the university through the helsinki.fi addresses.

- The constancy means a lot, emphasises computer science professor Hannu Toivonen.

The email addresses have been used as contact details in e.g. scientific articles for decades now, the URLs for twenty years. Lately, email addresses have become the username in many online services.

The history of the helsinki.fi domain has been documented on Petri Kutvonen’s web page (in Finnish).

Text: Susanna Rautio

Translation: Marina Kurtén