Collections, Programs and Services
Panel
Moon Kim
Acquisitions Librarian
California State University, Fullerton
Fred Gitner, MLS, MA
Asst. Director of New Initiatives & Partnership Liaison, New Americans Program
Queens Library
Xi (Cathy) Chen
Asst. Director of Programming & Operations, New Americans Program
Queens Library
This panel will present two case studies of outreach and collection building with local communities. 1) Queens Library’s New Americans Program has long focused on anticipating and meeting customer needs of the diverse and changing population living in Queens, New York. With 2.3 million residents coming from 190 countries and speaking 160 languages, we have forged partnerships with immigrant-serving community-based organizations and government agencies to provide relevant and essential programs, services and collections. Our goal is to assist immigrants to integrate into American society while providing them an opportunity to share their cultures with the community-at-large. In this presentation we will highlight how we have reached out to newcomers with both public programming and collections and share what initiatives have been most successful that could be replicated by other libraries. 2) California State University, Fullerton (CSUF) is a Hispanic Serving Institution and qualifies to be an Asian American and Pacific Islander serving institution. CSUF is currently in the process of developing a Vietnamese degree program, the first of its kind in the United States, that will include a bilingual education certification pathway and extensive training in Vietnamese and Vietnam Studies. The presenter will address the challenges in growing a language collection, especially as it relates to acquiring resources in foreign languages and/or published abroad, competing funding priorities with other programs on-campus, and providing access to resources for a growing student population and demand. The presentation will also discuss the strategies in building a collection of Vietnamese and Vietnamese Studies related materials in an academic library necessary to effectively support a new academic program and promote a collection building strategy reflective of the communities it serves.