On a sunny Monday afternoon, Lucy Chiem is stuffing paperbacks into cardboard boxes.
She does this carefully, tetris-ing the books in between each other to pack the maximum number of books into each box. The books, which have titles like Two Tribes and The Pirate and the Porcelain Girl, are being sent to local middle schools.
Chiem is a Youth Services Librarian in Bayview. She got introduced to libraries thanks to her grandmother, who immigrated from Vietnam to the United States in the late ‘70s.
Her grandmother was enrolled in ESL classes at their local library in Anaheim and would often bring Chiem with her.
Chiem eventually majored in Anthropology at UC Irvine, but slowly but surely, libraries pulled her back in.
“I thought I wanted to get into archiving for history museums, you know, oral history,” she said. Chiem worked for the city of San Jose, and the city of Palo Alto, doing projects where she partnered with public libraries. Soon enough though, she realized she wanted to become a librarian. She promptly enrolled in a library science program at San Jose State.
One of the best things about libraries, says Chiem, is that they’re free. The hard part is getting people to realize that all the freeness is for them.
Outreach at schools and neighborhoods, says Chiem, is key. The branch partners with local community organizers and institutions to engage people who might not have ever visited a library before. They ‘ve partnered with SFUSD to host reading programs, like Summer Stride, and the Department of Early Childhood Services to host professional development workshops for preschool educators.
Then there are the community events like town halls, Drag Queen Story Hours and, of course, book clubs and reading groups.
Chiem organizes events catered towards middle and high schoolers, like monthly gaming, free Lego play or movie afternoons. As she walks around the library, she points out a poster for an upcoming workshop for LED cloud lanterns. Arts and crafts events are very popular around here.
Every schoolday, Chiem says gaggles of kids come into the library after class to play computer games like Roblox with their friends, or even just to hang out and wait for their parents to pick them up.
On a recent Monday, Chiem spent the morning doing her usual: processing book requests, troubleshooting the branch’s catalog and training a high school volunteer from Thurgood Marshall.
“Mondays are pretty chill,” she says.
Her favorite day to go into work? Sundays.
“I like Sundays because it could be a coin toss. It could be really chill or if you have a program it could be like a lot of people too.”
That unpredictability is what Chiem loves — the challenge of meeting all sorts of different people and figuring out the best way to provide resources for them.
“Every day is very different . Just getting to know people in various ways just helps inspire or motivate you to think outside the box. Like, ‘How can we connect? How can we partner?’”
Her parting words?
“Visit all the different library branches because there’s so many different communities within the city that we provide services for. What you’ll find at one library location, you won’t find at the next.”
Yay for this article! I work for SFPL too and have worked at all the branches over my 20 years of employment – it’s true they are all special in their own way. And if you visit them all you can get a free poster commemorating your achievement!
https://sfpl.org/sfpl-explorer-map. Potrero Branch has one of the best views in the whole City in my opinion 🙂
S.F Librarians are simply wonderful! They know how to pivot and improvise, in order to deal with changing San Francisco, whether it’s homeless people, the tech age and various cultures, and trends.