“We always say libraries are for everyone, and when we say everyone, we literally mean everyone,” said Helen Lee, supervisor of adult services at the Newton Free Library. “So being able to meet the needs of people in different ways is very important to us.”
These services are also being used at a time when towns and cities across Massachusetts are facing budget constraints that some worry could result in cuts.
Maureen Amyot, director of the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners, said budget tightening in some towns — in places such as Marblehead and Chilmark — could affect services libraries provide to marginalized communities.
”People are turning to their public library for those programs and those ways to be connected with each other … the funding for the library is threatened,” Amyot said, potentially diminishing a “place that immigrants are welcome and that has all of these wonderful materials and services and classes and programs to help them.”
On a recent morning, Lihong Zhao, 42, attended an English class at the Newton library. She was told about the English language classes soon after moving here last year from Beijing with her husband and 14-year-old son.
“It’s [an] amazing library for me,” Zhao said. “I can study here and also borrow books in Chinese and English.”
Her classmate Izumi Tago, 56, from Japan, takes advantage of one-on-one tutoring.
“It’s helpful for me. I have been studying English for many years, writing and reading. But we didn’t have a lot of practice speaking,” Tago said. “When we first moved to America, we couldn’t understand. I needed to improve my listening and speaking. That’s why I take part in classes.”
In Newton, and communities across Massachusetts, the library’s foreign language section is also a living thing: As a city’s immigrant community grows and evolves, so does the library’s collection of books that reflects the languages they speak.
Years ago, members of Newton’s Korean community went door to door asking families for book donations to establish a collection of Korean texts, said Helen Pachenko, who manages Newton’s foreign languages collection. They’ve been building on that early campaign since.
“People want to go back to their old country, they want to know what’s going on,” Pachenko said. “They study English hard. But they also want books in their home languages.”
In 2023, after the arrival of Haitian immigrants into Greenfield, the library reached out to colleagues at the Boston Public Library and received books in French, Spanish, and Haitian Creole.
“So way out here in Western Massachusetts, we’re working with our colleagues across the state, and we’re trying to find ways to introduce new things to our community,” said Anna Bognolo, Greenfield’s library director.
In Cambridge, close to 30 percent of the city’s diverse residents were born outside the US. They speak Mandarin, Cantonese, French, Haitian Creole, Arabic, Bengali, and Korean. For Maria McCauley, director of the Cambridge Public Library, it’s only natural that her library will build a collection to serve them.
That drive to include everyone in the community serves the larger purpose of advancing American democracy, McCauley said.
“Our democracy is strongest when there is a diversity of both free thought as well as of people, and our libraries want to support that,” she said.
In Quincy, the Asian community has grown substantially since the 1960s.
At the Thomas Crane Public Library, the materials reflect that transformation. The collection has books in Chinese, Vietnamese, and Spanish, along with a small French section. Like Newton, the library also offers English language and citizenship classes.
“We are made up of diverse experiences, diverse cultures, diverse languages,” said Sara Slymon, the library’s executive director. “We want to be able to offer materials that reflect the community that folks live in. It’s important for children to see themselves in our materials.”
Thomas Crane has also established an oral history project partly to capture that immigrant evolution of the city and include community voices that sometimes can be excluded in official histories, Slymon said.
“We are working hard to make sure that folks who actually live in Quincy, and not just folks who are in power in Quincy, have their stories told for the future generations,” Slymon said.
Then there’s the Casa da Saudade Library in New Bedford, which stands as a monument to Portuguese immigrants in the city. The library, founded in the 1970s, helped workers in the fishing sector cope with being away from home for weeks at a time, as they would take books or magazines with them during their ventures out to sea, said Olivia Melo, the city’s library director.
Melo herself relied on the library to help her settle in the United States when she moved to the area as a 9-year-old from the Azores.
“I’m a walking advertisement for libraries in the community, especially if you’re an immigrant,” she said. “I used the library because I was a Portuguese reader, and we didn’t have the finances for my parents to purchase books.”
Her experience has turned her into an evangelist for the potential the library can have, especially for immigrant communities.
“I traveled the world quite a bit through a book, and that’s why I wanted to become a librarian,” she said. “I wanted to have people understand that libraries are very valuable in the community in helping people grow and learn and just educate themselves. And it all started with walking into the library and checking out a book.”
Amyot, of the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners, said she remains bullish about the role of libraries in Massachusetts, where a membership can potentially give residents access to nearly 350 branches across the state.
“If you have a library card, you can go online to the library catalog and request Portuguese items from the library in New Bedford or from the Boston Public Library,” she said, “and have them sent right to your community for you to pick up there.”
Omar Mohammed can be reached at omar.mohammed@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter (X) @shurufu.
