A unit within the National Library of Norway’s larger operations spends its working days cataloguing audio recordings in Oromo, acquiring books in Tigrinya, and sending Somali-language novels to prison libraries in counties that most Norwegians couldn’t quickly locate on a map. In comparison to national libraries, the Multilingual Library, or Det flerspråklige bibliotek in Norwegian, is not a large organization.
Millions of volumes cannot be stored in it. It stocks books and media in 41 languages and makes them available to Norway’s most vulnerable populations—asylum seekers, immigrants, refugees, and anyone whose mother tongue is outside the scope of what a typical Norwegian public library would hold—quietly and with what appears to be sincere institutional conviction.
Operating out of Oslo, the library serves not only individual borrowers but also the entire network of institutions that deal with multilingual populations, including county libraries, school libraries, hospital libraries, and prison libraries. It serves as both a lending operation and an advisory body on how to manage multicultural services.
Because it doesn’t result in tangible, countable items, that advisory function is simple to ignore. However, having a national center to consult for advice on acquisitions and cataloging is far more valuable than a book budget for a librarian in a northern Norwegian municipality who is suddenly faced with a sizable influx of Burmese speakers.
It is worthwhile to take a look at the language list. Major regional languages of sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, the former Soviet Union, and the Balkans are represented by forty-one languages, from Albanian and Amharic to Vietnamese and Yoruba.
The Multilingual Library is performing acquisition work that necessitates particular supplier relationships and skills that no regular library system maintains because they are not languages that European publishers regularly stock for the public market. Applying uniform bibliographic standards across resources across writing systems as diverse as Arabic, Burmese, and Chinese is the cataloging dimension alone. This is a technological task that is often undetectable until it malfunctions.
A lesser but illuminating facet of the organization’s work is publication. The Multilingual Library has the sole authority in Norway to translate and publish bilingual children’s books from the British publisher Mantra Lingua. Norwegian is paired with Arabic, Kurdish, Persian, Somali, or Urdu in these books, which are intended for kids learning two languages at once or for parents who can read one but not the other.
Five books, spanning from classic stories to modern children’s literature, have been released thus far. A child arriving from Afghanistan who can handle a book that speaks to both their old and new worlds is experiencing something that no digital alternative can truly match, therefore it’s probable that this specific program is the one that most closely relates to regular family life.
Considering what the Multilingual Library accomplishes, it seems to fill a void left by the majority of national library systems. Bilingual books for kids learning to read in two languages simultaneously, advising services to jail libraries, and distance lending to asylum seekers are all less glamorous than flagship collections or architectural showpieces. However, the moment you try to fathom who might be left out in the absence of such an institution, you immediately see its worth.
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