Green Libraries. Worldwide. A librarians’ tool. 4 Years later…

The project we launched in 2013: A checklist as an easy-to-use tool that will allow librarians worldwide to see what they can do to make their libraries greener: a checklist available in many languages, so that it will be understood by colleagues even with little or no command of one of the official IFLA-languages. They will be enabled to communicate with their staff and their users in their native languages about green topics. Our starting point was the IFLA-Conference 2013 in Singapore and our book project The Green Library. The challenge of environmental sustainability (published in 2013 as IFLA Publication 161). Where are we now? The checklist was originally devised in English and German; during the last 4 years we were busy finding colleagues willing to translate the checklist into as many languages as possible – a tool for greening libraries worldwide! There are 20 language versions available at present on our website: Arabic, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, English, Finnish, German, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish and Usbek. The project is definitely to be continued: We are looking for more translation and adaptations, even into the multiplicity of “smaller” languages – for greener libraries worldwide.