Interkulturelle Bibliotheksarbeit, Diversity
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»Which Direction?« That is the title of the animation workshop which was initiated by the City Library of Frankfurt am Main for young adults whose family background and experience includes flight or migration. The project’s content, as developed by its coordinator, Tanja Schmidt, was focussed from the beginning around teenagers who fled their home countries on their own, without adult family members.
To start off the five-day animation workshop, the library pedagogue chose the graphic novel by Marc-Antoine Mathieu, called »The Direction«.(Orig. French, »Le sens«, 2014). After discussing the book together, the youth were asked to tell their own stories and transform them into short animated audio-visual sequences. Their work was planned to be process-oriented and at beginner’s level.
In the workshop’s first morning session at the central library there were 15 young people from Afghanistan, Eritrea, and Pakistan, between 15 and 17 years of age. Although not mandatory, all of them told the story of their flight in their animation clips.
Over the next four days the teens worked on their clips in the morning at the library, while in the afternoon the audio and visual elements were developed on green screen backgrounds at the Youth Center on Heideplatz. Tablets and tripods were employed at the library to create an animation studio in miniature.
To avoid revealing the identity of the young filmmakers– for security and data protection reasons – it was necessary to be especially creative. Their figures needed to be disguised on the green screen.
Quite a few members of the German library profession have become actively involved in international networks for libraries and information services. Looking beyond national boundaries can certainly be of immediate and practical value, as evidenced, for example, in the current need for library services to refugees. Supplying suitable print media, digital resources, programmed events, and rooms for working with refugees is now one of the most urgent concerns of the profession. For library staff members there is a need to extend existing competencies and even to acquire new skills in a very short time.
In many other countries fellow librarians also fi themselves obliged to deal with similar challenges. As in many German libra- ries, they have also been focusing on what is necessary and feasible in order to implement a wide range of projects on short notice. To start with refugees must be explicitly told that they will be welcomed in the library. The Austrian Library Association (BVÖ) has gathe- red together various materials as part of its special theme project called »Reading Without Borders«, which includes the »Welcome Poster« which was already presented in the October 2015 issue of BuB. Further projects can be found, for example, in a survey which IFLA‘s Public Library Section published with the title »Responding! Public Libraries and Refugees«. Just as in many other areas of librarianship, the international exchange of expertise and experiences with library service to refugees is not a one-way channel: Many German projects, approaches, and products for assisting asylum-seekers are also being followed with great interest from abroad.