IFLA's Section on Library Services to Multicultural Populations celebrates its 20th anniversary

摘要

Anniversaries are always an invitation to review and evaluate the past. So let's take this opportunity to look at the history of the Section on Library Services to Multicultural Populations from its a very modest beginning as a Committee, through a Round Table to the present status of a Section with a very active programme, including satellite meetings, workshops and programme sessions during conferences, and a series of successful cooperative ventures with other IFLA Sections and Round Tables. Library service to ethnolinguistic minority groups has a century-long tradition but its goal was, for many years, not to support minority languages and cultures but rather to speed up the process of assimilation of immigrants in the host society. Large-scale population movements caused by World War II and postwar changes in socio-political conditions in many countries as well as a sudden surge of interest in national roots and ethnic heritage made the problem of library service to ethnolinguistic groups a prominent issue in librarianship widely debated in the late 1950s through the 1960s and 1970s. The problem attracted the attention of local and even national governments but the number of libraries actively involved in providing this type of service in each country remained limited, and those involved in this area of work have increasingly felt a need for contacts with colleagues in other countries. In 1973, when Marie Zielinska was given the task of organizing at the National Library of Canada, a central library serving all Canadian ethnolinguistic communities through the network of public libraries she gathered an informal circle of librarians interested in the exchange of information and ideas by correspondence. Some members from the group had the opportunity to meet in person at the IFLA Conference in Brussels in 1977.