This exhibition would not have been possible without Jūratė Caspersen, Chair of the World Lithuanian Community Cultural Committee. In 2019, she approached the Lithuanian Studies Section of the Heritage Documentation Research Department at the Lithuanian National Martynas Mažvydas Library with the idea of creating an exhibition in the summer of 2020 on the Lithuanian press in the diaspora after 1990.
In these times, it is often said that a crisis creates possibilities. Having to begin work on the exhibition during a quarantine, our procedure was somewhat unusual. We worked from home, and had to depend on our own knowledge, experience, intuition and the sources accessible on the internet (luckily, most publications were already digitized and online, for example at epaveldas.lt). The most important task was researching contacts and asking questions. In this way we were able to connect and reconnect with various editors and, coincidentally, provide the library’s fonds with missing issues. We spent time considering the significance of one of the most radical publishing changes in the past decades – the migration of the Lithuanian press of the diaspora to the internet.
The exhibition includes only a small number of Lithuanian publications that existed in the diaspora. According to the National Library’s data, there were more than 50 publications in English alone after 1990. Thirty years ago Lithuanian communities outside of Lithuania were flourishing, and are still dynamic, as shown by the profusion of available media, from traditional newspapers to today’s websites, social networks, forums and blogs.
The exhibition, presented in seven sections, invites visitors to learn about both print media and electronic publications in Europe, USA, South America, Canada and Australia. A separate section is dedicated to publications that were repatriated to Lithuania, and another to radio and television programming that was important to the diaspora. Finally, the section “Communication on the Internet” is an overview of virtual forms of contact and information.
The purpose of the exhibition is to illustrate the wide variety of media that has existed in the diaspora since 1990. We have provided the visitor with the opportunity to experience the colourful and dynamic panorama of Lithuanian media in the diaspora, not as a meticulous bibliography, but rather with overviews of selected samples. We trust that the research we have begun and the new information, details and nuances it reveals will be further reflected in exhibitions, articles and books in the future.
The exhibition was curated by the staff of the Adolfas Damušis Centre for Democratic Studies and the Lithuanian Studies Section of the Department of Heritage Documentation Research of the Lithuanian National Martynas Mažvydas Library.
We kindly thank Ramūnė Sakalaitė Jonaitis, one of the editors of the digital Lithuanian-Canadian Tėviškės Žiburiai (The Lights of Homeland), for translating the exhibition into English. |
