Open Road

Open Road was established as a collaborative project to provide online resources and services for Victoria’s multicultural communities. Unlike the limits imposed on print-based multilingual library collections, which predominantly cater for the largest non-English speaking groups, the internet is one way that public libraries can extend to meet the needs of smaller and emerging groups within their communities.

Owned by the State Library of Victoria, and managed by the Public Libraries Unit and Libraries Online, the Open Road project involves:

• a training program for Victorian public library staff to enable them to provide multicultural services
• the configuration of public internet workstations in public libraries to handle multilingual access
• ongoing development of the Open Road directory as a starting point for multilingual surfing in public libraries.

Based on initial work undertaken by the Port Phillip and Maribyrnong Library Services, Open Road was first launched as a static website in 1999. This site provided links to six major community languages - Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Russian, Turkish and Vietnamese. The second phase of Open Road targeted another 12 languages including Arabic, Greek, Indonesian, Italian, Polish, Russian, Sinhalese and Turkish. Further resources have been identified for Amharic, Hindi, Oromo, Persian (Farsi), Somali, Tamil, Tigrigna and Vietnamese. The project is currently focusing on developing resources for the Sudanese communities.

Open Road provided public library staff with scripts and accompanying instructions on how to format PCs so that they display languages in their correct fonts. Staff were also given links to search engines, government and academic websites, and key reference works such as dictionaries and biographies.

In 2003 the Council of Australian State Libraries (CASL) established a working group to investigate the feasibility of developing a national model and operational framework for the provision of electronic multicultural library services.