C R Y D E R P O I N T 18 APRIL Queens Library was awarded a $400,000 communities through public libraries. library spokeswoman Joanne King said. Staff must be trained to serve immigrants, King said, especially because of cultural barriers. For example, “some cultures find it inappropriate for women to look men in the eye, or vise versa, or to disagree with a figure that they feel is an authority,” she said. The library also has to “make the point very strongly that libraries are not government and that we’re here to serve them” since immigrants from some cultures are hesitant to get involved with a government organization, she said. New Americans might have questions that they’re hesitant to verbalize for these reasons, and staff is trained to be sensitive to this issue. Queens Library’s New American Program has been the model for serving immigrants through libraries since the late 70s; libraries from all over the world come to learn about it, King said. Work made possible by the grant will be a “formalization and an extension of that program and will allow Queens Library to share that knowledge more readily through a digital gateway,” King said. Queens Library was also honored with the American Library Association’s Library of the Future Award, with prizes — $1,500 and a 24-karatgold framed citation of achievement — donated by Information Today Inc. The award was given for the development of Queens Library’s proprietary interface for Google Nexus tablets. Following Hurricane Sandy, Google donated 5,000 tablets to the library so that library customers could borrow them for job development, education and other recovery efforts. For the Nexus tablets to work, they need Wi-Fi, and many Sandy-affected areas didn’t have that, said King. Queens Library had to find a way to make tablets useful to customers whether they had Wi-Fi or not and to make the tablets easy and welcoming for customers to explore, whether or not they had computer training, she said. Queens Library developed its own simplified interface for the tablets and preloaded them with 18 CRYDER POINT COURIER | APRIL 2014 | WWW.QUEENSCOURIER.COM content so that the tablets would be useful even when were offline. Initially, the tablets were only available from seven libraries in areas affected by the storm. Central Library in Jamaica and Queens Library in Flushing will join the program in May, and by this summer, tablets will be lent through the program borough-wide. Library cardholders can rent the tablets for free, and all tablets have pre-loaded, library-curated information such as education resources, immigrant resources, job search information, community health information and library resources. Queens Library learned about both national recognitions toward the end of March. “Queens Library heard about both of these awards within a few days of each other, and our staff is always excited to hear about how their hard work is received,” said King. Queens burned as smoking cessation money shifts to Manhattan BY ANGY ALTAMIRANO State funds to aid programs helping smokers put an end to their habit are calling it quits in Queens. The Queens Courier has learned that Queens Quits, a partnership between the Queens Health Network, the American Cancer Society and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, will no longer receive grant money from the New York State Department of Health (DOH). Queens Quits is one of the state DOH’s Tobacco Control Program Cessation Networks, and continued funding would allow it to keep reaching out to over 6,000 health care providers in the borough, asking patients about tobacco usage and providing interventions, training, materials and feedback. From 2005 to present, Queens Quits has conducted 346 trainings and has collaborated with 6,073 health care partakers including physicians, nurses and dentists, sources told The Courier. Also for the past five years the New York State Smokers’ Quitline for the New York metro area has gotten 3,236 referrals from Queens, compared to 2,288 from Manhattan, 2,102 from Brooklyn and 1,700 from the Bronx, sources said. Instead, NYU Medical Center will now receive the funds for the city and will manage all the outer boroughs out of a Manhattan office, a source told The Courier. “Though disappointed in losing its grant, Queens Cancer Center and Queens Hospital remain committed to reducing smoking in Queens, and will continue to support smoking cessation efforts in any way possible,” the Queens Cancer Center of Queens Hospital said in a statement. According to the state DOH, the 2014 Health Systems for a Tobacco-Free New York grants were awarded based on a competitive Request for Applications (RFA) process. Applications were requested from “organizations that will work to engage health care systems to improve the delivery of guideline-concordant care for tobacco dependence through systems and policy change at the organizational level.” Following a comprehensive review of all applications, awards were made to organizations that best met these criteria, the NYS DOH said in a statement. QUEENS LIBRARY WINS GRANT, AWARD three-year federal grant through the Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program. The grant, administered by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, will aid Queens Library in developing best practices for serving immigrant “Immigrants come to Queens from 120 different countries, and almost half the borough speaks a language other than English at home,” Photo courtesy of Queens Library The Queens Library interface makes Google Nexus tablets-forloan accessible to everyone.
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