Tag Archives: indigenous languages

Upholding Cultural and Linguistic Diversity: Reflections on International Mother Language Day

International Mother Language Day (21 February) is an annual affirmation of the important role that cultural and linguistic diversity plays in building sustainable societies.

Cultural and linguistic diversity are fundamentally linked to freedom of expression and access information; they are at the heart of the promotion of cultural and educational rights.

If the availability of educational material, cultural expressions, scientific information, and artistic works do not reflect the linguistic diversity of the community, the possibility for all members in the community to meaningfully engage with, and to benefit from, this material is severely limited.

International Mother Language Day 2022

As the world looks to post-pandemic recovery, considering the lessons learned over the past two years, the opportunities and challenges of digital technologies has become a central theme. Ensuring opportunities associated with technological advances are available to all is an important element of upholding universal rights and freedoms concerning expression, access to information, and cultural participation.

With this in mind, UNESCO has named the following theme for International Mother Language Day 2022: “Using technology for multilingual learning: Challenges and opportunities”

UNESCO will take this opportunity to encourage a discussion on the role that technology has in advancing multilingual education and supporting the development of quality teaching and learning for all.

Audrey Azoulay, Director-General of UNESCO, addresses this theme in her message:

Technology  can  provide  new  tools  for  protecting  linguistic  diversity.  Such  tools,  for  example,  facilitating  their  spread  and  analysis,  allow  us  to  record  and  preserve  languages which sometimes exist only in oral form. Put simply, they make local dialects a shared heritage. However, because the Internet poses a risk of linguistic uniformization, we must also be aware that technological progress will serve plurilingualism only as long as we make the effort  to  ensure  that  it  does.

Libraries are gateways to information and knowledge, as well as community-level nodes in connectivity infrastructure helping to bridge the digital divide.

Making cultural and linguistic diversity a pillar of library collection development, cultural heritage preservation, and library programming promoting diverse cultural expressions can help further the role of libraries as key partners in preserving and promoting linguistic diversity.

Libraries for Universal Access and Meaningful Connectivity

Discussions on how technological advances may benefit cultural and linguistic diversity must first address the key challenge of bridging the digital divide. Any opportunities that can be brought about by digital transformation will not successfully reach those who could perhaps benefit most without addressing gaps in digital access.

Libraries bring valuable solutions, practices and lessons-learned to internet governance policy dialogues that prioritise addressing the digital divide.

For example, one of the takeaway messages from the 2021 Internet Governance Forum in Katowice highlights the role of libraries in the discussions on universal access and meaningful connectivity:

Public access through institutions such as libraries can help deliver on all of the components of access that help drive development – equitable and inclusive connectivity, content and competences. The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated that countries had to prioritise the massive development of connectivity infrastructure to connect the unconnected to an increasingly digital world.

IFLA urges discourse on the role of digital technologies in upholding cultural rights and promoting multilingualism to examine gaps in the connectivity infrastructure. We encourage policymakers to look to libraries as knowledge partners who can help work towards universal access and meaningful connectivity.

Find out more, and how you can get involved in this work, here: Dynamic Coalition on Public Access in Libraries: Annual report and a look ahead to 2022

The role of Memory Institutions in Selection of Digital Materials for Long-term Preservation

To enable the enduring preservation of and access to cultural heritage, including in digital form, in line with the UNESCO 2015 Recommendation, steps must be taken to preserve digitised and born-digital materials.

This can be a practical application of upholding plurilingualism through cultural heritage preservation.

Reviewing policies that decide what digitised and born-digital materials are preserved serves an important role in upholding UNESCO’s call to ensure that technological progress serves plurilingualism.

There is a need to address the questions – what material is being digitised? Are these decisions reflective of the world’s rich cultural and linguistic diversity? Who is making these decisions, and, if applicable, are they being carried out with appropriate community consultation?

Selection Guidelines

A tool to aid these selection decisions is the recently launched 2nd edition of the UNESCO-PERSIST Guidelines for the Selection of Digital Heritage for Long-term Preservation.

These guidelines were created primarily for use by practitioners in cultural institutions who make the day-to-day decisions about which digital materials are candidates for long-term accessibility. They support practitioners in reviewing existing policies, highlighting important issues to consider, and providing guidance in drafting institutional policies.

The Guidelines stress that the material for collection that they refer to is intended to include digital content created by or about all ethnic, religious, gender, social, and political groups found in all regions of the world. The Content Task Force who created the Guidelines recommends that archives, libraries, and museums consult and collaborate with underrepresented communities when making selection decisions to ensure that documentary heritage created by and about these communities is identified for long-term digital preservation.

Access the Guidelines here in English, Spanish, and Arabic: 2nd Edition of the UNESCO/PERSIST Guidelines for the Selection of Digital Heritage for Long-Term Preservation.

Connecting Cultural and Linguistic Diversity to Sustainable Development

Agenda 2030 recognises the importance of education that promotes appreciation of cultural diversity, education for sustainable development, and recognition of culture’s contribution to sustainable development in Target 4.7:

By 2030 ensure all learners acquire knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development, including among others through education for sustainable development and sustainable lifestyles, human rights, gender equality, promotion of a culture of peace and non-violence, global citizenship, and appreciation of cultural diversity and of culture’s contribution to sustainable development.

Achieving this goal will not be possible without recognition of the key role that multilingualism plays in education for sustainable development.

This is being reflected more and more in international efforts to address global challenges through education, culture, and the arts.

Here are some key developments that could provide inspiration to reflect on the role of libraries in connecting cultural and linguistic diversity to sustainable development.

UNESCO Futures of Education Report

UNESCO’s Futures of Education initiative and recent report, Imagining our Futures Together: a new social contract for education, stresses the importance of promoting increased diversity in knowledge.

This includes linguistic diversity, diverse world views, and ways of knowing that have traditionally been left out of formal education, such as indigenous knowledge. The dimension calls for climate education to be prioritised in order to fundamentally reorient how the place of humans in the world is understood.

Read more about libraries in the Futures of Education Report: Libraries Contributing to a New Social Contract for Education.

 International Decade of Indigenous Languages

The International Decade of Indigenous Languages will span 2022-2032, and calls for global action to preserve, revitalize, and promote the world’s Indigenous languages.

The recently launched Global Action Plan outlines and seeks to coordinate actions for national governments, indigenous peoples’ organizations, civil society, academia, the private sector and other actors.

The Action Plan includes much scope to involve librarians in this work, including the development of professional competencies for information and media professionals, including librarians, and carrying out of awareness-raising on the importance of including Indigenous language material in their work.

Find out more here: Global Action Plan of the International Decade of Indigenous Languages (2022-2032)

Libraries around the world are already carrying out programmes to involve their communities in preserving indigenous culture, including oral tradition. See just one of many examples from the Library Services for Saskatchewan Aboriginal people, in which Indigenous storytellers take part in the annual Saskatchewan Aboriginal Storytelling Month, held both in libraries and through online platforms in order to reach more people.

Stay tuned for more information from IFLA on how libraries can be involved in the International Decade.

Inspiring action through multiculturalism and multilingualism in the arts

Cultural and linguistic diversity, expressed through the arts and both through traditional and digital platforms, add critical voices to efforts to address humanities most urgent challenges, such as the climate emergency.

During the 26th UN Climate Conference (COP26), hosted in Glasgow in November 2021, the Climate Heritage Network officially launched the Climate Heritage Network Race to Resilience Campaign. This campaign calls for a scaling-up of efforts to use culture-based strategies to build climate resilience in our communities.

IFLA’s Secretary General, Gerald Leitner, joined the celebration to give a short address on the power of the written and spoken word in creating connections across cultures and finding solutions to humanity’s shared challenges:

Resilience requires connections. Connections to the past and the lessons it can teach us, but also connections between ourselves, binding us together. Connections enable us to mobalise to support each other, to understand one another’s experiences and values, to create and innovate in the way we face our common challenges. The written and spoken word provides one of the most effective ways we have to realise these connections. It moves, it forms, it enables actions at all levels. It should be available and accessible to everyone, because for culture-based strategies to enable us to build a more resilient world, they need to be inclusive. This is what libraries… look to achieve.

He went on to introduce the poet, filmmaker, and musician Rosanne Watt, who hails from the island of Shetland, Scotland. Her work is deeply connected to her homeland, a connection which she says she can express best through the Shetland dialect.

In this, she stressed the importance of Indigenous languages in bringing voices to climate action.

The use of digital platforms to enable remote participation enabled diverse voices to be brought to high-level COP26 events. Watch Rosanne perform poems in both English and the Shetland dialect on this occasion [YouTube].

To note: among the resources launched during COP26 in November 2021, Climate Heritage Network’s Working Group on Supporting Climate Action by Local Communities and Indigenous Peoples has launched a resource “Models of Supporting Climate Action by Local Communities and Indigenous Peoples” [access this resource here].

Get involved in the discussion!

The intersection of cultural rights with multilingualism and digital transformation will be among the topics explored at IFLA’s upcoming Resiliart x Mondiacult virtual event: Libraries enabling inclusive and meaningful participation in cultural life.

Join the conversation on Wednesday 23 February [15:00-16:50 CET]. More information and the link to register is available here: ResiliArt x Mondiacult at IFLA – Meet the Panel and Register Now!

Strengthening Relationships, Empowering Communities: Library Reflections on International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples

On 9 August, we mark the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples.

Through the 2021 theme: Leaving no one behind: Indigenous peoples and the call for a new social contract, the UN calls for a new approach “based on genuine participation and partnership that fosters equal opportunities and respects the rights, dignity and freedoms of all”. Learn more about this year’s theme here [link].

Of course, meaningful change must come at every level, including in policies. However, creating community by fostering learning and partnership can be an important driver of positive change. Libraries are spaces for such participatory processes to happen. They can be nodes for education and conversation, for ensuring that voices are heard and that the lived experiences of marginalised peoples are centred in the narrative.

Engagement with Cultural Heritage

Access to knowledge, information, and resources are central to the mission of the library and information field. Critically, access includes access to cultural-relevant materials. This includes materials in a diverse range of languages and concerning the cultural expressions and life of the community of one’s choosing.

Accessing and interacting with cultural heritage and expressions are essential for the passing-down of knowledge within a community. They also enable meaningful encounters across cultures in the spirit of fostering multiculturalism.

We saw examples when IFLA’s Cultural Heritage Programme Advisory Committee organised the virtual event, Libraries Inspire Engagement with Cultural Heritage. This webinar invited speakers working with their institutions’ collections, visitors, community groups, and the larger public to help people experience, appreciate, learn from, and share cultural heritage.

Some perspectives shared centred on an Indigenous view of cultural heritage librarianship, and highlighted examples of how memory institutions can work on engagement with collections in partnership with concerned communities.

Here is a look at highlights from these conversations.

Indigenous Worldviews in Libraries

Camille Callison, chair of the IFLA Indigenous Matters Section and Librarian at the University of the Fraser Valley, Canada spoke about steps libraries can take to create relationship with Indigenous communities, towards building a cultural hub and a heart within our institutions.

An important step is including Indigenous worldviews in libraries and acknowledging the Indigenous communities who are the traditional stewards of the land.

The land itself can be a library – telling the story of the community’s creation and linage and the origin of nations. Community elders, the keepers and tellers of stories, are themselves living libraries and archives.

Translating this knowledge into library institutions can be done through building relationships with the communities. This can include inviting elders to give story-times and making opportunities for Indigenous artists to display, share and speak about the art they create. It also includes using appropriate terminologies in classification systems and subject headings, and by respecting the ownership of knowledge by Indigenous peoples, such as by correctly citing Indigenous knowledge – including knowledge transmitted orally by Indigenous storytellers.

She stresses the importance of training – both aimed at encouraging Indigenous peoples to enter the library profession, and through cross-cultural learning to enable library and information professionals of all backgrounds to work together to create more inclusive systems. These efforts are critical to ensuring the cultural relevance of libraries for Indigenous communities.

Watch Camille’s full address online here: LINK

Community-Driven Collections Engagement

Heidi Swierenga, Senior Conservator and Head of the Collections Care and Access Department at the Museum of Anthropology, University of British Columbia, Canada, shared several examples of how the institution enables Indigenous communities to access collections in a way that values the intangible heritage of community knowledge and tradition.

An important aspect of this work are the three types of access visits that the museum has developed. The first invites community groups or individuals to interact with collections at the museum itself, offsetting the costs of their visits through a granting programme. The museum also carries out study visits, in which collections of material are brought directly to communities. She highlights that these are reciprocal learning exchanges, where museum conservation staff enhance their own understanding about the objects, their creation and their meaning, from the community members.

The third type of access she detailed is loaning for activation. In this programme, objects from the museum collection that serve, for example, as traditional evidence of important rites and privileges are brought to communities to fulfil the function for which they were created.

These loans push hard again the traditional view of museum collection standards, as the usual requirements around environmental control and handling procedures of the objects are dropped to allow meaningful engagement with the object. This is made possible by aligning institutional practices with the key principle that Indigenous peoples have the right to manage and control their own material culture and information about that material culture.

We encourage you to find out more and see examples of these access programmes in action here: LINK

Leave No One Behind

Libraries are spaces for community, education, storytelling, cultural transmission and sharing. They are spaces where the narrative of our communities can be revisited, revised, and made more inclusive. They are hubs for community activation and participatory processes that push for meaningful legislative change.

Ensuring libraries are culturally relevant for Indigenous communities, creating connections that centre Indigenous worldviews and perspectives, and empowering Indigenous librarians, community leaders, artists and storytellers are all important aspects in ensuring libraries are active champions of development that leaves no one behind.

We encourage the international library community to work in partnership with Indigenous communities to create this space together.

Follow IFLA’s Indigenous Matters Section for more information about their work towards supporting the provision of culturally responsive and effective services to Indigenous communities throughout the world.

Preserving and Promoting the Igbo Language in Libraries

2019 is the International Year of Indigenous Languages. IFLA has been celebrating and promoting the year, sharing stories of libraries from all over the world, which are contributing to the safeguarding and promotion of indigenous languages and cultures.

We have been in Canada, where libraries are collecting and preserving historical and culturally diverse records to ensure that indigenous groups benefit and see themselves reflected in the work of libraries. From there we went to the border-area of Germany and Denmark, where we learned how the Danish library in Germany provides access to literature in the mother language. From Germany to Geneva – Wend Wendland, Director of WIPO Traditional Knowledge Division, explained more about the relationship between copy right and traditional knowledge.

The next stop in our trip around the world is in Nigeria. Nkechi Sabina Udeze, Acting Director of Anambra State Library Board and Amaka Florence Nwofor, Senior Lecturer of Library and Information Science at Nnamdi Azikiwe University give us an insight into how they are working to preserve and promote the Igbo language in Nigeria.

Preserving the Igbo Language

The project by Anambra State Library (ANSLB) was born out of UNESCO’s 2016 warning that the Igbo language could become extinct by 2025, and following its participation in the Cultural Heritage contest run by the African Library & Information Associations & Institutions (AfLIA).

To preserve and promote the Igbo language, in 2018 the library created a cultural heritage corner in the headquarters of the Board with collected books and artifacts from communities through members of the Board.

Librarian protecting Igbo heritage, NigeriaThe collection grew through strong advocacy and documented oral history records from students of the department of LIS, Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka. These records were made available by the lecturer leading on teaching Oral Tradition in the Department, Mrs Amaka Nwofor.

The ANSLB’s activities and programmes include presentations of Igbo language and culture such as drama, folklore, poetry, songs, reading, proverbs and riddles. The library preserves the Igbo language through engaging the younger generation to speak the Igbo language, and to make use of the books and electronic information resources.

The Library visits local communities, organises activities and programmes, and attends general meeting of Traditional Rulers. These Rulers have submitted historical records of their towns and advised others on how to do the same and make sure that their town’s history is preserved.

The Anambra State Broadcasting Station also hosts a radio show by the Acting Director of the ANSLB, Nkechi Udeze PhD. In her show she stresses that historical records should be translated into the Igbo language, while complementary copies and electronic versions should be brought to the cultural heritage corner of the ANSLB for preservation, documentation and dissemination.

The radio show has received great feedback, and listeners are commending this innovation geared towards checking the extinction of the endangered language and culture. As a result of this laudable project, more members of the communities are donating books and artifacts to support the preservation of the Igbo language and culture.

By All, For All: A World Book Day for the World

Books by all, for all: Libraries celebrate World Book Day 2019

Books have long played – and continue to play – a key role in recording the past, sharing knowledge, and creating inspiration. World Book Day offers an opportunity to celebrate this contribution to knowledge and culture.

In 2019, there is a particular focus on indigenous languages, given the International Year. This is a reminder of the importance of thinking about how books as a means of preserving and sharing all cultures.

For libraries, this diversity of production is key. As institutions with a mission to meet the needs of all members of their communities, there is a strong interest in supporting and promoting local production, in all languages spoken by users.

To celebrate World Book Day 2019, therefore, this blog explores the reasons why it is so important to make this a day for all readers and writers in all cultures.

 

Books By All

Traditionally, the cost of printing presses and the need to run distribution networks have meant that publishing has been an expensive business. Publishers have given different voices access to these opportunities, bringing their voices to the world.

However, for those who do not manage to find the support of a publisher, the opportunities have been much narrower. Writers who are only likely to reach a small audience – because of the subject, or the language – of their works have had fewer possibilities.

This is of course changing, with technology offering new possibilities to self-publish, or to set up smaller independent operations which help new and diverse voices reach public attention.

These new options complement the existing landscape, allowing for a more diverse range of books to reach the market.

Clearly new writers need support, especially when they don’t benefit from the sort of support that a publisher will often offer.

While libraries clearly can’t provide an advance, they do offer a number of other key services – classes in creative writing, free research possibilities, and in some cases a showcase for local talent.

We will be exploring some of these means of supporting new authors in a session at WLIC this year.

 

Books For All

It does not make sense to talk about World Book Day without a focus on access. Indeed, to look only at the production of books would run counter to the universal mission of UNESCO, the organisation that set it up in 1995.

Copyright has made it possible for the (intangible) content of books to be treated in much the same way as a physical (tangible) object, and allowed for the creation of the type of market for books that we see today.

However, there is the risk of failure. Traditionally, market failures happen when the full benefits (or costs) of an action are not taken into account by the actor.

This can be the case with books, for example where someone may not have the money to buy a book, but there are clear benefits to society as a whole from them having access (to learn, to research, to discover new opportunities).

Libraries already have a key role in overcoming such failures by providing access to knowledge and culture.

Complementing markets – which continue to sell copies of books to those who can afford them, and want to enjoy them forever – they ensure that everyone has the chance to gain from what books have to offer.

This is as important in cities in major developed countries as in rural communities speaking indigenous languages.

 

With World Book Day 2019 focusing on the importance of indigenous languages, and 2019 being the year that SDG 10 (Reducing Inequalities) is in focus at the United Nations, it is a great opportunity to remember that this can only be a truly global event if it looks at books by all, for all.

Libraries are key to making this a reality.