Fregnir - 01.03.2004, Blaðsíða 43

Fregnir. Fréttabréf Upplýsingar - Félags bókasafns- og upplýsingafræða
A series of workshops were also held throughout the symposium, covering a range
of issues, including freedom of speech, discrimination, archiving and quality of lib-
rary services. Due to the great volume of work presented, the following is a selective
account of the highlights, which focus mainly on the sessions related to society and
information and user groups and services.
Keynote Speakers
Three simultaneous Keynote Sessions started off the second day of the symposium in
which the following guest speakers presented their papers:
Ragnar Andreas Audunson’s (Norway) session, “Libraries in a multicultural and
digital world: the Importance of Low-Intensive Meeting Places,” focused on libraries’
potential to create a bridge between the local political communities and the virtual.
Paul Sturges’ (UK) session, “Understanding Cultures and Freedom of Access to
Information,” focused on the need for those serving multicultural societies to aim at
providing equal and full access to information for all within a community, rather than
just focusing on providing materials, which are culturally signifícant to, and in
languages of, the minority groups.
Dr. L. Anne Clyde’s session, “Multiculturalism, intemationalism, and research in
school librarianship” pointedly addressed the existence of multicultural societies
throughout history and the phenomena that affect those of today.
The following is an excerpt from the abstract of her paper:
“Multicultural societies are not new. They are also not necessarily the result of current
trends to ‘globalisation’... though globalization has certainly had an influence on
today’s multicultural societies. Multicultural societies have existed throughout rec-
orded history; what is new is that multiculturalism is named and the various cultures
that contribute to a society are acknowledged. However, even this can be seen as an
idealistic statement, since there are a number of countries today where members of
non-dominate racial, ethnic, religious, cultural, language or social groups are not only
denied basic human rights but live in fear. Multiculturalism should not be confused
with ‘intemationalism’, another trend today, a trend that also has historical precedents
(for example, consider the position of Roman and the Latin language two thousand
years ago)”.
User Groups and Service
In his paper, “Adapting Library Services to Local Needs: Diverse Document Delivery
Models Providing Rural Areas,” Mate Toth of Hungary confronted the common de-
bate of allocating resources to minority groups in the face of the all too conunon scar-
city of funds and resources faced by libraries. He slightly diverged from the common-
ly accepted idea, as is encouraged in the IFLA’s Multicultural Communities Guide-
lines for Library Services, that “the provision of library materials for members of
minority groups should be related to the size of the group and its reading needs.” In-
stead, he encouraged the allocation of resources based solely on information needs.
This follows along the same lines as Paul Sturges session to provide equal and full
access to information for all within a community. These highly user-centered approa-
ches to serving multicultural populations are interesting in that they do not focus en-
tirely on the culture, language or ethnicity of a group, but rather on the information
need(s).
Society and Information
Students from Croatia came with studies on meeting the needs of the Roma (a.k.a.
Gypsies) with the presentation of their papers, “Roma People’s Community in
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