Libraries in Transition

The ethnic mix of California’s population is changing fast, and public libraries must change with it. To help libraries understand what that means, California’s state librarian recently sponsored a RAND Corp. study, followed by a conference in San Diego. The report shows that the state’s minority population will be nearly a majority by the year 2000, that education is a stronger predictor of library use than race is, and that family income helps determine whether adults but not children use the library.

Curious to see how libraries currently serve minority communities, we dropped in at two with splendid records--the Chinatown Library, within the city of Los Angeles system, and the East Los Angeles Library, part of the Los Angeles County system.

The Chinatown library has 56,000 books--half of them in Chinese, as well as a substantial Vietnamese collection. It ranges from martial arts to medicinal herbs to Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” in Vietnamese. Head librarian Elsa Wu also noted a variety of community activities in her library at College and Yale streets that include citizenship classes, tutoring in English conversation and help with income-tax forms.

The East Los Angeles Library contains a Chicano Resource Center with 7,000 volumes as well as films and other materials about or by Mexican-Americans in the United States. Universities often have such material, but this is the only public library with such an extensive collection, according to Lisa Castaneda, who is in charge of the center. The library, on East 3rd Street, has books, magazines and newspapers in Spanish along with one of the largest Japanese collections in the county. Senior librarian Albert Tovar explained that many Japanese who have moved from the area still return from Monterey Park or Gardena to use the material.

For libraries in transition, “one of the most important things is sensitivity, being aware of changes that are occurring in the community so you can set up information and referral services to help,” said Linda Chavez, who evaluates ethnic materials for the county library system.

What of tomorrow? As the RAND report pointed out, public libraries expect to need between 70% and 80% of the available librarians over the next two years. But but only 28% of the state’s library school students want to work in public libraries when they graduate. The East Los Angeles Library, for example, has no special children’s librarian now because of the difficulty in finding librarians in general and bilingual librarians in particular.

Despite the budget shortages that are all too common today, these libraries serve their communities because they know their communities. Their librarians work with the schools and community groups; they don’t always wait for people to come to them. They can be a model for libraries in transition from basic reservoirs of books to providers of more services for more people.