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New Americans
Aired November 6 and 7, 1999
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This is Internet On The Air. I'm Joan Silvi. How are immigrants using
the Internet to adapt to American culture?... Details in a moment.
Funding Credit: Internet On The Air is a production of the University of Michigan School
of Information and Michigan radio, made possible by a grant from the W.K. Kellogg
Foundation.
Immigrants arriving in America at the turn of the century relied on friends and family to
find their way in a new society. Today's immigrants are using the Internet at public
libraries to learn about the U.S. in their native languages, practice English, understand
citizenship law, and send e-mail to friends back home.
Queens, New York, is the home to one of the largest communities of immigrants in the
United States. They've arrived from over 90 different countries and speak 50 languages.
Gary Strong, the Director of the Queens Public Library, says these "New
Americans" start using the library within ten days of arriving in the United States.
They find newspapers, magazines and literature in languages ranging from Bengali to Urdu.
Classes in coping skills are also popular, especially one that teaches "How to Deal
with your American Teenager".
But it's the library's WorldLinQ Internet gateway that causes immigrants to line up each
day before the library opens. WorldLinQ lets them search the Web in their native language,
read news from their homelands, and locate online resources to immigrant-serving agencies
in Queens. A Korean patron can look up the softball scores in Seoul, and a Russian
immigrant may search apartment listings in Flushing. Searching the Web in their native
language is the New Americans' self-help link that keeps their ties to roots in the old
country and eases their adjustment to U.S. high-tech citizenship.
To hear an interview with Gary Strong or to listen to our other programs, visit our Web
site at www.iota.org. For Internet On The Air, I'm Joan Silvi.
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The Interview 
IOTA interviewed Gary Strong in September 1999.
What prompted the formation of the New
Americans Program?
The New Americans Program came as a result in the mid-70s of the library realizing that
we were not reaching the Spanish-speaking population in Queens. That, indeed, as we did
some customer surveys,the Spanish-speaking population was just not evident in the use of
the library. But, more importantly they were indicating that they had no awareness of the
library.
As a result, we applied for a federal Library Services and Construction Act grant,
received funding to create a special service for the Spanish-speaking, and as a major part
of that effort, engaged a public relations firm to develop a public relations campaign in
Spanish. Began to reach out through the Spanish-speaking media, newspapers, and the radio
stations. Several years later when we did a follow-up survey, we learned that the usage by
the Spanish-speaking population had significantly increased. Not only did we do public
relations, we began to look very carefully at hiring librarians in Spanish-speaking
communities that could speak Spanish. We began building our collection of popular Spanish
language materials, newspapers, magazines, books, and I mean popular vs. scholarly or
translations of nifty works from Spain, because most of our immigrants come from Central
and Latin America, and still do. Spanish is still the 2nd most spoken language in Queens,
with Chinese following that.
How did the program evolve?
We expanded the New Americans program beyond Spanish because it had been so successful.
We also at that time built in a very large component of what we call Coping Skills
Programs and English for Speakers of Other Languages, because we found that people wanted
to learn English but that there were few resources in Queens, and those that were
available were very expensive. We began offering classes in English, and so today, we have
the largest public-library based offerings of English as a second language courses in the
United States. We have 3,000 students per year coming from 90 different countries,
speaking 50 different languages.
How do New Americans benefit from the Coping
Skills Program?
We run our Coping Skills programs so that people can come and in their own language
learn about citizenship in the United States, not just how to become citizens, but how to
live. How do they go about getting a job, how do you start a small business. Queens is
responsible for the creation of 47 % of the small business start-ups in New York City.
Eighty-five percent of those are start-ups by immigrants, so the library's role in
assisting them in learning how to do business in New York City has been a very strong
role. One of our most popular series is "How do you cope with your teenager in the
American Culture". If you are a parent coming from a culture where you are honored
and respected and you suddenly have a rebellious American immigrant teenager on your
hands, what do you do. And these are all led by very qualified individuals that we search
out throughout the entire community.
Describe the experience of a New American
walking into your library.
We typically see a new immigrant within a week to ten days after they start living in
Queens, and that is the typical connection with the library. They have heard about us from
a broad word of mouth, before they left the country they were emigrating from , or right
after arrival in the United States. What they're going to find is a bit of frustration
frankly, because there is a waiting list for our English as a Second Language programs.
They're going to be welcomed immediately in terms of the collection and activities for
children, the after-school programs, and most of all they're going to be welcomed by
materials in their own language. It's going to be what they would typically find in a
bookstore or better library in their country, if there were libraries in their country.
Many people immigrating don't have a history of public library service, and certainly not
a library that allows you to take materials out for nothing. They're going to find music
from their own culture, they're going to find movies that would be able to be rented or
borrowed from video stores in their home town, they're going to find newspapers and
magazines from their hometown.
What is the role of the Internet? What is
WorldLinQ?
One of our local newspapers had picked up an interview with a vacationing Taiwanese who
came into the Flushing library to access the free Internet service. [She wanted] to
communicate with family and friends in Taiwan to find out how they were, and to see
whether they were still alive basically. She was blown away that we provide this basic
level of free Internet access in our public library. What they find in the Internet is a
system we call WorldLinQ. We developed it with a large grant from AT&T which allows an
individual in multiple languages, Chinese, Korean, Russian, Spanish, French, to search
world-wide web sites that we have reviewed in the same way that we would select a book.
[The sites] have valid and current, up-to-date information in a website located in that
country. Then those are book-marked and built within a framework that allows for easy
searching. Most importantly, it allows for the display of non-Roman text on our computer
terminals throughout the entire system.
We can also search our own catalogs in vernacular Chinese and Korean so that the
materials and resources we have in the collection in non-English languages are searchable
in their native character set. We believe very strongly that we provide an equity of
access, whether its electronic, print, programming, etc. in the library context, that
there should be an equity of access. It isn't the English-speaking Web, it's the World
Wide Web.
We also find that while there are commercial search engines, what you typically get
from those first searches is whoever bought advertising. The library role as I see it is
to provide that non-commercial, reasoned, mediated-access navigation support in the
electronic arena as much as we do it for the print arena.
Is it difficult to track down non-English
websites?
No. We have a webteam of professional librarians, 22 people, who spend five hours a
week selecting non-English language websites. They come with a knowledge of their
countries and languages, and they actively look for websites in languages other than
English that meet our profile, and then review them just as you would a book or anything
else. More importantly, we go back on a regular basis to make sure those websites haven't
changed in some way and are still active.
The greatest problem we find still, is that in many countries they shut the electricity
off at quitting time and so systems come down. As we find really useful websites, a part
of our international program is to [convince places] like the National Library of China to
keep their servers on at night. When it's midnight in Beijing it's noon in New York. And
now we've convinced them to keep their websites up 24 hours a day. And that's a major
problem, is the business practices of other countries.
Do people of different cultural backgrounds
approach the web differently?
We want to make them different and they're not. I was interviewed by a Korean reporter,
a young man, and he couldn't figure out what we were talking about with this WorldLinQ. He
had been assigned to do this story, and so I thought, he's 24-25 years old, and I brought
up the Korean WorldLinQ sites and clicked on sports. It turns out he's an avid Korean
softball freak, and he couldn't find the scores to the previous nights game, they hadn't
come in on the news service yet. He literally took the mouse out of my hand, and began
clicking around, [I can't read Korean], and he immediately began writing down the scores
from the previous night's results. That's what it's all about. We do business sites, arts,
culture, education, government. We have an international business section in our
International Resource Center.
What challenges were faced that would be
similar for other libraries interested in developing these types of services?
I think a lot of it has to do with one's philosophy and attitude. We are very
customer-centered as a library and we do a lot of demographic analysis, market-analysis if
you will. I don't mean to necessarily speak in business terms, but that's what it is. We
don't build library service to perpetuate an institution. We build library service that is
responsive to what people want to use, the kinds of inquiries that they have in their own
lives. We start from that basis, being customer-centered. Other urban libraries are
caught, I believe, in the maelstrom of whatever the urban politics is. We're a
not-for-profit organization. We are not a part of New York City government. If we were a
part of NYC government, I believe deeply that we would not be doing what we're doing. The
politics of the moment drive the institutional base for urban public libraries.
I also think there is a certain amount of what we were taught that said you develop
great collections. Well, I believe there are great libraries in this country that build
great collections for scholarship. But most of the people who walk into our libraries and
adult learning centers aren't there for scholarship; they're there to survive, they're
there to cope with what's happening in their daily lives. That's where we fill the bill.
When they can walk in and they can feel connected back home but also feel connected in
their new community, we are doing something that is relevant for that individual, and
that's why we have the highest circulation of any library in the United States.
If it's a matter of give 'em what they want, I guess we do that. On balance, we find
that people use a whole variety of resources and materials in that process. Our immigrant
users use the public library more than our native-born American users, and many of them
come from backgrounds where there was no public library. So, we must be doing something a
little bit right.
Please direct questions or comments to iota.webmaster@umich.edu.
Last Updated November 5, 1999
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