The best-selling biography of Steve Jobs is flying off the shelves at libraries in Queens, which is not surprising. But in many of the borough’s 62 branches, the copies being borrowed are in Korean, Chinese or Spanish.
A library branch in Astoria, responding to its own diverse readership, carries children’s books in Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Russian, Portuguese and Gujarati, the official language of a western Indian state. And when branch librarians noticed an influx of yet another group, they acquired the story of “Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves” in Croatian. Striving to cater to the intensifying globalization of its surrounding streets, the New York neighborhood library speaks your language as never before. The surge in immigrants patronizing the Queens system has spurred its branches to offer books, DVDs and CDs in 59 languages, more than double the total a decade ago. So important has acquiring foreign-language books become to the Queens Library’s mission that Radames Suarez, who supervises the Spanish collection, travels every year to the largest Spanish book fair in the world, in Guadalajara, Mexico. The Queens Library even has a staff demographer. As with bilingual programs that teach students in their native languages as well as in English, the internationalization of neighborhood libraries has led some to question if making foreign books easily accessible impedes or hastens assimilation. Ms. Kim acknowledged that she worried that many Korean immigrants were “reading only Korean books or watching Korean TV or interacting only with Koreans.” Still, she said, in New York “we like to keep our own cultures as well.” And other librarians argue that making books available in native languages draws immigrants into a library where they will in time browse the English texts.
