02122nas a2200097   4500000000100000008004100001653004800042100001700090245009300107520182400200                                       d10aOral traditions and expressions (ICH\_1227)1 aE. Civallero00aTraditional games, music and oral tradition: intangible tools in multicultural libraries3 aA people’s intangible heritage is composed by the nonmaterial part of its culture: tales and narratives, games and songs, music and all the knowledge usually transmitted by oral or sound means, in traditional societies as well as in urban, westernized ones. This heritage is the basis where a human group funds its identity, its projects for the future, its memory, its history, its fears, its desires… When peoples lose this untouchable, fragile fragment of their culture –as it daily happens to aboriginal societies all around the world- they lose their reason for living, their past and their future… A library which wants to become “multicultural” should include this kind of materials –orality, music, folk games- as well as the people who still transmit them: narrators, musicians, artists… By recovering these parts of different cultures, the library will keep alive the human cultural diversity; it might use ancient traditional means for teaching and informing in order to transmit traditional and modern knowledge; it might consolidate vanishing identities and familiar / group bonds; and it might revitalize endangered idioms, since orality is mainly based in the perfect and creative use of mother languages… Oral tradition is based on memory, words, sound and improvisation. It is a living, ancient art, enjoyed by children and old people, literate and illiterate alike. Some of their expressions can be understood by everybody –no matter their race or nationality- and, in this way, they can work as channels for integration and mutual understanding within plural societies. The conference will present some basic ideas about the use of these valuable elements inside a “multicultural library”, using examples tested by the author in indigenous libraries in southern South America.