A Brief Primer: 100 Years of Library Services

Libraries have protected and advanced the American dream since the late 19th century. Librarians have been writing and thinking about how to serve America’s changing population since the early 20th century.

Let’s listen to the librarians:

In 1906, J. Maud Campbell, a librarian from the Passaic, New Jersey Public Library, wrote in Library Journal, “the office of education is (mandated) to feed life, to change existence from a dull round of necessary duties to a pulsing, living desire to reach out for something better …” Ms. Campbell was speaking of the Italian immigrants in her community.
In the 1990s, Maria Casado of Hialeah Public Library in South Florida writes of the Hispanic immigrants in her community: “Our people learned that they had the public library…It’s a familiar welcoming place where those who feel unfamiliar (in America) can go. ”

In 1910, in a speech reported in Public Libraries, Josepha Kudlicka asserted that libraries “have come to be more than a place where ‘they hand out books to read’ but a place where help and information of all kinds is asked and received.”
In 2007, almost a century later, the Queens Borough Public Library in New York City sponsors the New Americans Program with citizenship and job training information, advice on helping children and adults learn English, and cultural programs for a richly diverse community.

In 1911, F.C.H. Wendel wrote in Public Libraries: “the library can be made the middle ground on which all of the races that make up our population may meet on a basis of equality.”
In 1999, Kristin Shelley brought Somali and Hispanic residents of her community together at the Hilltop Branch Library for a festival called “Come Meet Your Neighbors.”

From 1900 to the beginning of World War I, immigration to the United States shifted from the United Kingdom and Germany to Italy, Poland, Greece, Russia, Syria, and Asia.
In 1965, when the United States passed the Hart-Cellar Act, the old quota system that gave preferential treatment to European immigrants was abolished.
In the 21st Century, most immigrants come from Mexico, India, Philippines, China, and El Salvador.

Immigrant groups are part of communities all across the United States. While 60% of new immigrants live in just six states – California, New York, Texas, Florida, New Jersey, and Illinois – ‘non-traditional’ states in the South and Midwest regions have the fastest-growing immigrant populations.

• In the last five years, Georgia’s immigrant population has increased 39%.
• In Tennessee in 2000, immigrants from Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan, India, Japan, Congo, Mexico, and Vietnam speaking dozens of different languages live in the state. In fact, nearly 5% of Tennessee’s library patrons speak a language other than English at home.

This toolkit offers: