Abstract

As Korea becomes a multi-cultural society, Korean government ministries are enforcing various multi-cultural services. Especially, Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, which is in charge of public libraries, is operating multi-cultural services for cultural diversity. The trends in the research on the multi-cultural services in public libraries, however, are rather on adaptation of the multi-cultural people in Korea than on the cultural diversity. In this exploratory study, we investigated the perception of local residences on multi-cultural library services with several in-depth interviews with the local residences not only for the adaptation but also for the cultural diversity. The results shows that they tended to regard public libraries as an institution of local life-long education, and then they think public libraries can take a role for coping with social adaptation and prevention of social problems in terms of multi-cultural population. Based on the results, public libraries would better consider to inform their roles in this multi-cultural society to their local residences based not only on adaptation but also on cultural diversity. For this, the libraries would develop programs, in which both multi-cultural and non-multi-cultural people can be participated, to encourage communication between them.