Winds of Change - Centar za ljudska prava Univerziteta u Sarajevu ...

2. Aims and methodology
The purpose of our research was: firstly, to determine the extent to which minority issues are
present in the digital libraries on human rights across Europe, and secondly, to determine
whether digital libraries are in any way specially adapted for the use by members of
ethnic/linguistic minorities.
We analysed the contents and the search engines of fourteen digital libraries. Most of
these libraries belong to human rights institutes in different European countries. We searched
for any contents on minority issues, focusing especially on:
- whether a digital library offers access to minority-rights documents (national, regional,
international); if yes
- whether minority-rights documents are available in any minority languages;
- whether a digital library offers access to any minority-related publications (books,
periodicals, etc.);
- whether minority issues are easily noticeable in the digital library’s homepage;
- whether the contents of the digital libraries are available in different (perhaps even
minority) languages.
We created a questionnaire with nine questions relating to the structure of the website, the
languages used and the materials available (see below). Since the structure of the websites of
the selected human rights institutes differ considerably, it turned out that the designed
questionnaire was not always the best possible tool to capture different ways of presenting
minority issues in individual websites. Therefore in searching for the minority-related issues
we did not stick rigidly to the questionnaire but also followed the logic of the structure of
each individual website.
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