Tag Archives: LGBTQ

LGBTQ at Malmö City Library

IFLA_Torbjorn-Nilsson

 

 

 

 

Malmö City Library is Sweden first big city library to become LGBTQ certified. More than 125 employees receive training in new mindsets and skills for meetings with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people. The training, that is carried out by RFSL (the Swedish Federation for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights) will be completed in November 2015.

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Working with LGBTQ issues in libraries is to stand up for all people’s equal rights and in various ways work with the concrete meaning of this in our daily lives. The aim of this is an open and inclusive library environment. During this training we who work at Malmö City Library learn more about LGBTQ (Lesbian/ Gay/ Bi/ Transgender/ Queer) issues and deepen our knowledge of literature and films in this area as well. The aim is a better meeting with all people of Malmö.

”We work actively for everybody’s right to their own expression beyond the standards.”
For each individual, this means two and a half days of training. Alongside this training, we work with LGBTQ issues in everything from policy documents to marketing.

 

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With regard to practical library work, this entails, among other things, improving our ability to find literature with LGBTQ content and make visible to the visitor where this literature is located, for example by creating rainbow shelves.

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On October 12–18, an LGBTQ week was organised at Malmö City Library, with, among other things, a book and comics fair that focussed on LGBTQ.  A game designer told us about queer games and a conversation took place between Malmö’s Free City Author and LGBTQ activist Jude Dibia, Cihan Arikan from RFSL Newcomer Malmö and Jay Seipel from Malmö mot Diskriminering (Malmö Against Discrimination).