Hídszerepek - MEK - Országos Széchényi Könyvtár

Summary
Bridge Roles (Questions of Gypsy integration)
EDITED BY: ATTILA NAGY AND RITA PÉTERFI
This volume is the continuation of work begun decades ago. The
previous volume – A feladatra készülni kell. A cigányság kulturális beilleszkedése
és a közkönyvtár [Preparing for the task Cultural integration of
the Gypsies and the public library]. Eds. Nagy, Attila and Péterfi, Rita) was
published in 2004 in the National Széchényi Library’s Nemzeti téka
[National collection] series.
In keeping with the sub-title, the task that we were able to
undertake, our horizon at the time barely extended beyond the
functions of public libraries, although the findings of both international
studies and our own research had for decades been
stressing the enormous importance of early socialisation. So, right
from the moment that the manuscript of our earlier booklet was
completed we clearly saw the main task for the next volume: At least
a partial overview of the role to be played in this connection by
school and children’s libraries, student hostels and the schools in
general. (Solely for reasons of space, or in other words, for
financial reasons, kindergartens have not been included in this
list even though they have an exceptionally important function in
socialisation.)
It is our obligation to stress that, to our great regret, we were not
able to carry out any previous research work based on a carefully
considered, comprehensive strategy focusing on the given social
group as “planned commissions” that could serve as a basis when
writing the studies for the previous and the present volumes. It is a
well known phenomenon that questions and tasks to be solved
generally arise in practice before they appear in the academic
sphere. In the course of preparing various local and national surveys
and case studies and interpreting the results, we were often faced in
a surprisingly acute way with various aspects of the problems that
are the focus of attention here. In time these details became