The National Library at the 111th World Esperanto Congress
From 1 to 8 August 2026, the 111th World Esperanto Congress was held in Graz, Austria, bringing together more than a thousand participants from over sixty countries. This year’s Congress theme – “Volunteering for Sustainable Development” – directly referred to the International Year of Volunteers for Sustainable Development 2026, proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly.
During the Congress, Gabriela Skonieczna of the National Library of Poland presented to the Esperanto community, for the first time publicly, a report on the work being carried out on the Hector Hodler Library, which was acquired by the National Library in 2023. For a community that had cared for the collection for more than a century, this was long-awaited news: the collection is being systematically catalogued and made available on an increasingly broad scale.
The presentation focused primarily on the processing and cataloguing of the collection, which determines both its accessibility and the possibilities for conducting research on it. It was noted that, as part of the cataloguing process, the National Library uses artificial intelligence tools to support the preparation of bibliographic records. These experiences attracted considerable interest during the Congress, particularly among institutions holding collections in languages with limited digital resources, for which similar solutions are only now being developed.
A separate part of the presentation addressed the catalogue as a database. Esperanto accounts for less than 0.005% of the training data used by most large language models (LLMs), placing it below the threshold at which languages are generally reported at all. Language models have a good command of Esperanto grammar, but they lack knowledge of its culture. Reliable cataloguing of Esperanto collections therefore serves not only to safeguard cultural heritage, but also to build research infrastructure.
The presentation generated considerable interest among both participants and organisers, who emphasised the importance of the National Library’s efforts to preserve the heritage of the language created in Warsaw in 1887.
The presentation took place during the 48th Esperantology Conference, organised as part of the Congress by the Centre for Research and Documentation on World Language Problems, which has been active since 1952, under the direction of Prof. Klaus Schubert and Prof. Bengt-Arne Wickström. This year’s conference focused on libraries, archives and heritage preservation, as well as linguistic justice, interlinguistics and language policy.
Photo: John Huang