Author: HIT

As part of the Croatian Libraries in Australia project, supported by the Central State Office for Croats Abroad, a survey of three collections in Australia was conducted from 13th to 23rd February 2026. The collections of the Croatian Studies Foundation Library at Macquarie University in Sydney, the collection at the Croatian Archives of Australia in Sydney, and the library and the archives at the Croatian Club in Adelaide were partially surveyed. The full report includes an overview of the work carried out during the project implementation and the lists made.

Meeting with the Croatian community in the library of the Croatian Club Adelaide

Library of the Croatian Club Adelaide

Library of the Croatian Studies Foundation at the Macquarie University, Sydney

The newspaper Slobodna Dalmacija published an interview with Josip Lasić, Ivana Kurtović Budja and Ivana Hebrang Grgić on the occasion of the completion of the Dalmatian Dialects in New Zealand project, which digitized tapes recorded by Hans-Peter Stoffel in the 1970s. The interview was published on February 5, 2026 in electronic edition and on February 9, 2026 in print edition.

 

At the University of Sao Paulo, at the Faculty of Education, on November 24, 2025, Ivana Hebrang Grgić gave an invited presentation entitled Pesquisando publicações croatas na Austrália, Nova Zelândia e Brasil at the Estudos migratórios, bibliotecas e cultura literária na Croácia: projetos e propostos de diálogo. 

 

In Sao Paulo, Brazil, on November 23 and 24, 2025, meetings were organized and research was conducted in the Croatian associations Sociedade Amigos da Dalmácia and Croatia Sacra Paulistana, as part of the one-year institutional project Croatian emigrant press in Brazil: preliminary research and methodology testing. The meetings were attended by project collaborators – Dr. sc. Milan Puh and Assoc. Prof. Dr. sc. Ivana Hebrang Grgić. A lecture was also held on research into Croatian publications outside Croatia (Hebrang Grgić, Ivana. Publicações croatas na Austrália e Nova Zelândia), further cooperation and future research were agreed upon. In addition, the exhibition They  wrote in the glagolitic script by Ivana Hebrang Grgić was organized and presented.

From March to September 2025, audio recordings of old Dalmatian speeches in New Zealand, recorded on cassettes by Prof. Hans-Peter Stoffel in the 1970s, were digitized. A total of 50 recordings from 40 cassettes were processed and stored in the open access repository Croatian Emigrant Press in the virtual Hans-Peter Stoffel Collection. Metadata has been created, permissions for storage in open access have been collected, short descriptions have been created. Transcription, linguistic and cultural description are in progress. The recordings with full descriptions will be completed by the end of 2025 and available, in addition to this repository, on the website of the Institute of the Croatian Language and on the Kultura.hr portal. The digitization, processing and description are being carried out by Prof. Hans-Peter Stoffel, Dr. Sc. Ivana Kurtović Budja, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Sc. Ivana Hebrang Grgić and Assist. Prof. Dr. Sc. Jospi Lasić.

At the 14th Festival of Croatian Digitization Projects (Dfest) on May 9, 2025, a presentation was held on the digitization of audio recordings recorded in New Zealand in the 1970s by researcher Hans-Peter Stoffel. This is a project that will be implemented during 2025. Access to the digitized material will be through the infrastructure used in the Croatian Emigrant Press project (Croatian Emigrant Press Repository). More about the project is available on the website H. P. Stoffel Collection. The presentation was given by Ivana Kurtović Budja from the Institute of Croatian Language and Ivana Hebrang Grgić from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb. A summary of the presentation is in the Dfest programskoj booklet.

 

 

On April 8, 2025, Ivana Hebrang Grgić and Ana Barbarić gave a lecture entitled Tracing Croats in New Zealand: A Travelogue Research into Written Sources at Matica hrvatska. The lecture was organized by the Department for International Cooperation and the Diaspora.

At the celebration of the National and University Library Day in Zagreb, held on February 21, 2025, Assoc. Prof.  Ivana Hebrang Grgić received the National and University Library in Zagreb Award for her overall exceptional contribution to the development of library activities.

The Award for 2024 was awarded to her for her many years of encouraging development and innovation in the field of library activities, and in particular for the cooperation achieved under the Croatian Emigrant Press project, which has been running at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb since 2018.