Long Island libraries house collections in many foreign languages, from Spanish to Chinese to Welsh

The adventures of “Hombre Perro,” the Spanish-language translation of a series of graphic novels for children about a part-dog, part police officer named Dog Man, are hot titles at many of Long Island’s 110 public libraries this year.

Mandarin readers can pick up the complete works of Jin Yong, whose novels about ancient Chinese warriors were massive bestsellers in that country. Many of James Patterson’s thrillers also are available — in modern Greek.

Long Island always has been polyglot, but foreign or “world language” library collections that in some cases started with donated books in the 1960s are coming into their own. Suffolk’s member libraries share 30,462 such hard copy titles and Nassau’s 32,600, according to statistics shared by the county library systems. Thousands of titles also are available in electronic form. In Nassau, digital world language checkouts topped 14,000 in 2023, following years of increases.

The collections span dozens of languages. The lion’s share are in Spanish, reflecting generations of immigration into the region, but there are also thousands of volumes to meet the needs of readers who have immigrated in smaller numbers: Asian languages, mostly Chinese, along with Polish and French, read not just by the French but by some Haitians. 

Suffolk holdings include some volumes in languages that likely claim few Long Island speakers or readers like Welsh, Latin and Micmac, the language of one of the First Nations people of Canada’s Eastern Maritime Provinces. Libraries sometimes accept donations of books that are hard to find, or, if a patron requests a book that can’t be acquired through interlibrary loan, simply purchase it.

Patrons “want what they want, and the library is only effective if it meets the needs and interests of the community it serves,” said Irene Duszkiewicz, director of the Hempstead library, where the world language collection started with books donated after closure of a literature exhibit at the 1964 World’s Fair. The library now receives about $20,000 to $30,000 yearly from the Nassau Library System for world language acquisitions and serves as a repository for other libraries in the county, Duszkiewicz said.

By 2022, the latest year for which census statistics are available, about 27% of Long Islanders age 5 or older spoke a language other than English at home, up from 24% a decade earlier. Those county-level statistics mask local variation in demographics and demand.

In Syosset, most residents speak English at home, but the portion of people speaking Asian and Pacific Island languages jumped from about 14% in 2012 to about 19% in 2022. Librarians noticed many of the new residents spoke Mandarin, and in 2022 the library hired a Mandarin-speaking librarian, Yin Li, who has added hundreds of Mandarin titles to the shelves, along with books in Korean and Japanese. “We need to do more to bring more people into the library, [and give] more and better reading experiences,” Li said.

Her acquisitions balance high-circulation self-help titles with Chinese-language classics like “Dream of the Red Chamber” and translations of English-language classics like “The Great Gatsby.” She builds buzz — and circulation — with colorful flyers advertising the latest arrivals and Mandarin-language discussion groups, strategies used at many bookstores.

Library career centers

Xibe Escalante, assistant library director in Brentwood, where 68% of residents speak a language other than English at home — mostly Spanish — says the library offers close to 10,000 books and other materials in 54 languages. For some patrons, the chief draw isn’t books but services like English and citizenship test prep classes, Escalante said. The library’s career center, once little more than a few tables near the reference desk, now employs 12 multilingual staffers who between them speak Spanish, Portuguese, Russian and Ukrainian. They help about 100 patrons a day write resumes and fill out job applications.

Brentwood’s librarians view each encounter as a chance “to build a relationship with patrons” that leads to deeper engagement, Escalante said. For example, a parent who comes in for job help may “see they can bring kids to the library, and that we have materials they can read to their kids in their native language,” she said.

Librarians building a world language collection have encountered challenges from acquiring the books to cataloging them.

Cataloging is now often automated, even for non-Roman alphabet titles. But rules that require libraries to purchase materials from United States-based suppliers can make sourcing difficult, and the construction of books printed overseas does not always stand up to the rigors of circulation, though build quality has improved in recent years, Duszkiewicz said.

To find books, “You would get most of your books from newspaper and cigarette stores in areas where that particular language was spoken,” she said. Duszkiewicz still visits some of those shops, including a Polish bookstore in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and a Hungarian shop in Westchester County.

The number of domestic suppliers of foreign language materials has grown, especially since the 2020 Census, Duszkiewicz said, and big websites including Amazon and Barnes & Noble appear to be selling a larger selection of foreign language titles. “The companies saw the need and they saw a way to make money,” she said.

But buying a book in translation can still take months, said Mara Marin, Uniondale Public Library director. “You have to wait for somebody to translate it,” wait for somebody to publish it and sometimes also wait for the reviews in professional journals librarians use to guide purchases. “It's a long and laborious process,” she said.

Patrons call collection essential

Hiring multilingual library staff also can be difficult, said Caroline Ashby, Nassau Library System director. Most of Long Island’s libraries work under Civil Service rules that offer few bilingual positions, and most of those are Spanish-English, she said. Generally, a library must hire staff who score near the top of the list of Civil Service exam takers, regardless of their language skills. “For communities with large Asian or Haitian populations, for example, it is nearly impossible to hire staff with language skills that reflect the community,” Ashby wrote in an email.

Some Long Islanders who use the world language collection said the libraries were providing an essential service. Amy Chen, who was born in Taiwan and moved to Syosset in 1985, said she began using the library as a young mother looking for bedtime stories for her children. She got those in English, but preferred Mandarin for her own reading. In English, “I know the major story, but I'm missing a lot of understanding of the words or the details,” she said.

Her reading life changed when, several years ago, she discovered Nassau's digital collection — “I was so happy!” — and met the librarian Li. “Every time I would go to the library, I'd talk to her” for book recommendations, she said. 

Julie Zhu, who works for a scientific publisher, grew up in Shanghai, also speaking Mandarin, but moved to the United States in the 1990s to pursue a doctoral degree in American literature focused on Willa Cather. When she moved to Syosset in 1999, her family was one of the few who spoke Mandarin and the library carried few Mandarin books, she said. 

Zhu said she hoped to see more books by Asian American writers in coming years, and was gratified to see the Mandarin collection growing. “It's a good balance,” she said. “There’s a very large Chinese-speaking population, so it definitely makes sense for the library to invest more.”