The Open Road is an exploration of the nexus between electronic multicultural library services and migrant and refugee community web publishing initiatives in community languages.
The cultural and linguistic diversity in our communities is increasing, providing new language communities for public libraries and community based organizations to support and provide services for. Information technology is becoming an increasingly important tool. The possibility of supporting emerging community languages through public access computers and public access to the internet offers new opportunities for our communities.
Unfortunately, some languages are better supported by technology than others. There is a technological divide following linguistic boundaries, which needs to be addressed.
The Open Road will explore Unicode language support issues in minority and emerging community languages within Australia
The Open Road is an initiative to assist public libraries and community organizations in exploring the potential of using the internet to provide services to their diverse communities.
The Open Road team provide training workshops and training sessions on a range of topics involving multilingual public internet access, web internationalization and strategies for access provision to multilingual electronic resources. Workshops and training sessions for public library staff will be listed here.
Current training modules include:
The Open Road project conducts research into: