Havmannen Welcomes You

June 7, 2010
Monday was our formal introduction to Mo i Rana and included visits to the local newspaper, industrial park and National Library. Our guide for the day was Steiner Høgaas, a retired Parliamentarian , former Secretary of State, former head of the local business collective and currently a board member for several prominent organizations in Mo i Rana. To introduce our group to Mo i Rana, we started the morning at the local newspaper, Rana Blad. The Ansvarlig Redaktør (Editor in Chief and Managing Director), Kirsti Nielsen met with us at 9 am to give us a brief overview of the publication. With a six day a week circulation, the newspaper is picked up by 10,535 subscribers. This paper, like most in Norway, has chosen to skip printing on Sundays since it is too expensive with additional costs to have anybody work on a Sunday. Norwegians are second only to the Japanese for newspaper consumption and a typical Norwegian reads 1.6 newspapers. Rana Blad has a daily readership of 28,000 with 9,000 daily visits to the website. It also hosts a mobile edition and a social network. The 300+ newspapers in Norway are typically owned by one of the five big media companies. Rana Blad is owned by A-Pressen. There is a conglomerate rule in Norway, limiting any on company from owning more than 33 percent of all the media.
Rana Blad is a 30 page publication with 46 employees and 60 paperboys on staff. The company offices include three branches: Rana Blad for the reporting and writing; Mediebyraaet for advertising, public relations and design; and Helgeland for the distribution. The yearly income for the company is around 60-65 million kroners with 60 percent of the income coming in from advertising and 40 percent from subscriptions. A one year subscription to the newspaper would cost 2,000 NOK while a single newsstand issue sells for 20 NOK.

After walking through the newspaper offices, we headed around the corner to Mo Industripark AS. This industrial park has been the major employer in the city of Mo i Rana for years. In 1945, when the industrial park first opened, there were 8,400 residents in Mo i Rana and five years later, there were 25,000 residents. In square mileage, the industrial park is equal to the entire downtown town center area. The processing industry at Mo Industrial Park convert raw materials and local hyrdo-power into products that are in demand worldwide. The six processing enterprises in the park have an annual revenue of 3 billion NOK or the same revenue as the fish and aquaculture in the whole of Nordland County. The park is also home to Norway’s only steelworks and Scandinavia’s only rolling mill for the production of reinforcing steel. This movement to produce steel started in the 1970s, after the oil crisis, when Norway realized that they needed to start producing their own steel rather than being dependent on the fluctuating prices of imported steel to survive. This park started with ore, iron and steel and today the 2.7 sq. km. industrial park is home to the process industry, the business sector including the engineering industry, IT businesses and national IT-based service providers and two fish-farming facilities. There are currently 2,200 employees working at the park but there are plans to double the steel industry thanks to the large demand from India and China.

Perhaps the most interesting stop of the day was to the Nasjonalbiblioteket (National Library). In the 1980s, there was a decline of industry in Mo i Rana. In 1989, the government passed the legal act to deposit archives which was the nation’s law to collect and archive every piece of distributed information (print, broadcast or online) to save for future generations. The archives found a home in Mo i Rana and several of the unemployed were trained in specialized skills to help maintain the archives. There are currently 210 employees in Mo i Rana and another 160 employees in Oslo. The goal of the archives is to make every document ever generated available. It is the individual or the company’s responsibility to drop off a copy of these documents to the National Library to be archived. Since the conception of the National Library, the government is seeking to make this the first entirely digitalized library. The original documents are archived in a vault in the mountain that is 42 km deep (length of a marathon). There is also a separate digital repository inside the mountain. Why inside the mountain? The first and most important reason is temperature control. The vault is a stable 8˚ Celsius, which is ideal for preservation. It is also protected from any outside climate changes, warfare or flooding. Finally, there is endless room and in fact, there is currently renovation for another expansion. Outside the mountain is a nitrate film vault; nitrate cannot be placed inside the vault since the chemicals can start a fire inside the mountain.

Following the rules for making a deposit into the national archives is a lengthy process. For example, seven copies of any book need to be delivered and according to the law, one copy would go into the mountain archives, one would go to Oslo, four copies would be sent to the four major universities and one copy would be placed in the national public library for requests. Newspapers must send two copies of each edition, one to be placed in the vault and one to be digitalized. The national archives has several separate sections including a cleaning area to process and restore old books, an audio/visual section to digitalize all broadcast and audio recordings including the daily NRK Nordland tapes and a film section to restore old films. The archives also hold any items that were sent out as bonuses when buying a document. For example, the library has a pair of pink Barbie flip flops, a bonus item when buying a magazine. The library cannot discriminate and keeps a record of anything printed whether it is news, comics, erotica or anything controversial. The goal is to preserve history today so others can learn from us in the future.

One of the most interesting aspects of the National Library is the cutting edge technology. We visited the daily use records, a section designed to fulfill requests for information. Here, nearly one million publications are randomly placed in bins and a computerized robot can retrieve any requested book. No humans are allowed into the stacks and would not even know how to find the requested material if they tried since it is not filed in any particular order. In another section of the library, two newly purchased digital scanners automatically flip pages and scan entire newspapers. Since Norway is a small country and has a limited number of literature through the years, the idea of digitalizing everything is not as daunting as some other countries. There are currently about one million pieces of literature in the archives.

Our day ended with a visit to Havmannen or “The Man from the Sea” statue. Situated in the water and facing outward to greet incoming ships, this granite stone statue was designed by famed English artist Anthony Gormley and is 11 meters (36 ft) tall and 60 tons in weight. The artist originally imagined the statue in steel, since steel was one of the pillars of the industrial Mo i Rana. It was placed in this city to symbolize the sharp contrast between nature and industry. Unfortunately, the steel industry was suffering at the time so this because Gormley’s first stone structure. The making of Havmannen became a controversial topic within Mo i Rana and was heavily discussed in Rana Blad, the local newspaper, for two reasons: whether it was appropriate use of public money and the lack of male genitalia. Nowadays, the town takes pride in the statue and even celebrates an annual festival, Havmanndagene, every May. Our host, Vigleik, explained that Havmannen faces outward, toward the sea, to welcome the ships coming into the harbor and help encourage prosperity and business in the community.