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Cultural Institutions
Cultural institutions and activists are tremendously important in language
support, not only those directly connected with preserving written cultures,
but also theatres and conservatories, art schools, folklore performers, cultural
centres in remote areas, and individual artists and cultural workers.
Memory Institutions: Libraries, Archives and Museums
It is the duty of these institutions to preserve, store, popularise and offer for
public use all essential testimonies of a particular people’s history; to elaborate
all possible ways and forms of accessing its cultural and written heritage,
intellectual and artistic products; to contribute to saturating public space –
both real and virtual – with them.
Libraries and archives must search, acquire, describe, study, popularise
and store all printed matter, sound and video recordings emanating from a
language, both in the geographical area that is densely inhabited by its users,
and other areas (even foreign countries) where those languages are used. Not
only materials in minority languages but all information about them published
in other languages is important.
The activities of memory institutions include:
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• gathering, preserving and extending comprehensive and thematic
collections of all published and unpublished materials in a minority
language;
• creating full-text databases of periodicals in the given language;
• constructing an exhaustive bibliography of printed and written
resources in the language;
• making available centralized catalogues of publications in the language
(especially important for languages that have recently acquired a
graphic system);
• including bibliographic descriptions of works reflecting the history
and culture of an ethnic minority in electronic national catalogues of
all libraries at both national and international levels;
• popularising these works, especially by organising readers’
conferences, reader clubs, and meetings with writers, critics,
publishers, illustrators, and others;