The Old Neighborhood Branch

The NY Times yesterday had a very interesting article on the breadth of the Queens Library's offerings to its patrons.  Queens being one big gigantic melting pot, the 62 branches found that they needed to expand their books, DVD's and CD's to include the languages being spoken and used in their branches.  So now the languages available total 59!  The article states that that is double what was offered a decade ago.  Here is a link to the article: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/03/nyregion/queens-libraries-serve-59-languages.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=queens%20public%20library&st=cse.

I also visited the Queens Library website to look up the branch I used as a kid.  It was the Broadway branch of the Queensborough Public Library on Steinway and Broadway in Astoria, Queens.  Here's pics of the outside and children's room:

Except for the sign, looks exactly the same.

Children's room has different tables.

And here is the nifty new check out desk:

Customer Service!

Look at the sign, it says "Customer Service"!  It was never as cool as this when I was a kid.  But the website says that this particular branch has 17 International language collections.  Wow!  Here they are: 

Arabic

Bengali

Chinese

Croatian

French

Greek

Gujarati

Hindi

Italian

Korean

Portuguese

Punjabi

Russian

Serbian

Spanish

Tagalog

Urdu

Maybe Italian and Greek were around when I was a kid.  I'm so glad that the old neighborhood library is keeping up with the times.