Public libraries and linguistic diversity: A small scale study on the Slovak Ethnic Minority in Eastern Croatia

摘要

One of the key missions of the twenty-first century public library is to foster inter-cultural dialogue and favour cultural diversity by reaching out to all members of the local community, especially multicultural populations. This paper will present a fragment of the data gathered in a multi-phase exploratory study whose aim was to survey the multicultural services of Croatian public libraries and collect and analyze data about information needs and behaviour of longestablished national minorities in this country, and measure the level of their satisfaction with the library services. This paper focuses on the Slovak national minority in Osijek-Baranya County, their information needs and perceptions of libraries as a source of everyday information and reading material in their mother tongue. Data was gathered with the help of quantitative methodology. Self-administered questionnaires were distributed through Slovak cultural associations and the Central Library for the Slovak Minority. A total of 112 questionnaires were returned, making a response of 56%. Because 2,155 members of this national minority are registered in this region the study covered ca. 5% of the whole population. Descriptive statistics and variant analysis were used to analyze data. The study has confirmed that respondents, members of the long-established Slovak national minority in Osijek-Baranya County, have the need for diverse information and reading material in their mother tongue: only 8.9% said that they do not need information resources in Slovak. As expected, the large majority indicated that they need these materials to stay in touch with their cultural and linguistic heritage (79.5%). Also, results showed that only 24.1% respondents use the public library as a source of information and reading material in Slovak, following newspapers and magazines (67.9%), Slovak cultural associations (63.4%), personal contact (54.5%) and the Internet (42%). The importance of this research lies in its implications for development of library services to multicultural communities in Croatia as well as offering suggestions for improving the collection building in Croatian public libraries, in particular regarding material in languages and scripts of long-established minorities. Authors also hope that this study will encourage librarians in Croatia to systematically collect and analyse information about their local community minorities, especially their library and information needs.