A Celebration of Community: LA County Library’s Asian Pacific Resource Center
Written by Katrina Lucerna
LA County Library is one of the largest library systems in the country, with 86 branches spanning over 3,000 square miles and within that vast system, there live four gems. LA County Library is home to four cultural resource centers educating, archiving, and serving communities of color: the American Indian, Asian Pacific, Black, and Chicano resource centers.
In this issue, we introduce you to Katrina Lacerna, Librarian of the Asian Pacific Resource Center (APRC). Established in 1979 at the Rosemead Library, APRC plays a critical role in the county library system and is an invaluable resource to LA’s richly diverse AAPI/NHPI communities.
APRC also hosts programs and exhibits to celebrate the cultural heritage of AAPIs. This includes book discussions, author visits, art workshops, film screenings, cooking demonstrations, as well as music and dance performances. APRC also provides specialized reference assistance and referral services to assist in locating agencies that address the needs of the communities. Learn more about the APRC’s programs, services, and resources.
Can you describe the users of the APRC?
As a public institution, APRC welcomes and services a wide array of users. The general public, including families, as well as academics, researchers, and authors frequent the center. Given our proximity to LA and the film industry, we also get information requests from screenwriters, actors, or production staff.
Could you describe the size of the APRC and feature some of its collection highlights?
APRC’s collection has over 16,000 holdings, all focused on AAPI culture. This includes fiction and non-fiction books, audio books, dissertations, magazines, newspapers, and music and movies. We are the only resource center to offer materials in multiple languages, such as Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, and Japanese. The emphasis of APRC's English language collection is the AAPI/NHPI experience with a core collection on the history and culture. The microfilm collection holds over 100 titles of historical newspapers. Another highlight of the collection is our historical newspapers on microfilm. The APRC has over 100 titles on microfilm of historical immigrant and ethnic newspapers published in the United States, with some dating back to the 1800s. Researchers, academics, and authors visit from around the country to access this collection.
I have noticed an uptick in interest for materials on the Polynesian experience, particularly that of NHPIs. Customers have been requesting info on various aspects of NHPI culture, including linguistics and history. This may be due to SoCal’s large NHPI population as well as recent land rights battles and the momentum of the Hawaiian sovereignty movement.
The need for diversity and multiculturalism – has it become a concern for you when conducting workshops and exhibitions for your customers?
As APRC represents such a vast array of cultures, diversity is an utmost concern. In my opinion the AAPI umbrella term is rather ungainly and much too broad; it encompasses too wide a group which has no great unifying characteristics, except perhaps (rather expansive) geography.
Given the rather herculean task at hand, I do believe that APRC does an admirable job at providing representation for all these disparate cultural groups. As APRC Librarian, I have made a concerted effort to incorporate the voices of underserved AAPI communities, particularly that of Southeast Asians, in both our collection and programming. I want to ensure that everyone has a place at the APRC, while not allowing one voice to dominate.
What parts of your job is fulfilling and what do you find most frustrating?
Planning and hosting cultural programs is easily the most exciting part of my job. It’s a lot of fun to discover new presenters and performers, then working with them to provide programming in our libraries. It is also rewarding to share these cultural events with our community, which reflects their own traditions/history or exposes and educates others to another point of view.
Because of COVID-19, our programming efforts have moved online. While I miss the energy of face to face interactions with an audience, I am glad that we are able to provide high value and culturally relevant programs during a global pandemic. Our AAPI Virtual film festival in 2020 was the Library’s first stab at an online event. Another point of pride is the APRC’s “Beginner’s Guide to Sushi” cooking demo which, with over 450 attendees, is LA County Library’s highest attended virtual event.
This past May’s heritage month was jam packed with cultural events for all ages. Highlights included Chinese, Japanese, and Indian musical and dance performances through a partnership with the Music Center, as well as a Minecraft tour of San Francisco’s Chinatown hosted by teens from the Chinatown Community Development Center. The APRC also hosted a presentation from tattoo artist and educator Tricia Allen on Polynesian tattoo traditions that was very well received.
But I have to say, the everyday, mundane interactions I have with customers provide me with such joy. An entire library comprised of materials about AAPI culture is not the norm, unfortunately. We regularly have customers come in, amazed and excited that there is an entire Resource Center dedicated to the API experience.
What’s coming up for the APRC? Anything new or interesting?
I am also a member of the Library’s Immigration Task Force and early this year we applied for a Cal Humanities Library Innovation Lab grant. Thankfully we were awarded the money, and during the last several months I have been working in a statewide cohort to devise programming for our immigrant communities.
Inspired by a previous tattoo program, the project I devised is entitled “Stories on Skin: Tattoos and the LA Immigrant Experience”. This virtual series will take place in December 2021. We have invited leading tattoo artists and subject specialists to speak about the tattoo traditions of some of LA’s immigrant populations: Chicano, African, and Japanese and Samoan. I encourage everyone to attend as we have a really amazing slate of speakers. I hate to be partial, (but not surprising, given my interests) the Japanese/Samoan program is going to be extraordinary! Taki Kitamura is one of the best known Japanese tattoo artists in the country and, if all works out, he will also conduct a live tebori demo for his event. Please keep an eye out on www.lacountylibrary.org/virtual-programming to register for these events!
Visit the Asian Pacific Resource Center at Rosemead Library: 8800 Valley Blvd, Rosemead, CA 91770. (626) 573-5220 www.lacountylibrary.org/asian-pacific-resource-center
Katrina started with LA County Library in 2015 as the Government Services Librarian. She currently serve as the APRC Librarian. Katrina graduated with a BA in Asian American Studies from CSU Fullerton. She then received my MLIS from San Jose State University. Katrina is the daughter of Filipino immigrants and am a New Jersey Native. She believes that both experiences has indelibly shaped who she is, and how she pronounce her vowels.
