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Treasures of our Memorial Library Multiculturalism? You Bet! Our precious Library is certainly no "Tower of Babel". The vast majority of its books and periodicals is, of course, in English, and apart from bilingual dictionaries, they rarely offer a hint of any other language. But a reader whose mother-tongue is not English, or the English-speaker in search of the spice of another language will seldom have to go much further. Vancouver is surely one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the Americas, so it is fitting that our library offers a smorgasbord - a "pot pourris" of other tongues, for those who search. Even a cursory review of what we find here is stimulating, but soon raises questions, and invites further study, even if the student has no desire to seek proficiency in another tongue. For instance, your scribe soon discovered that our Library's shelves offer about 2700 books in Farsi (Persian), but only about 1600 in French - one of Canada's own two official languages! "There must be good reasons for this", I thought, and certainly, there are. In the libraries of French-Immersion schools of Greater Vancouver, and in Maillardville, plentiful stocks of books in French are readily available, and students can access them more simply than coming to our Memorial Library. But perhaps a more basic reason for the relative paucity of French books in our Library is the fact that, in West Vancouver District, people whose mother-tongue is French amount to only 0.41% of the District's population (according to "Canadian Demographics, 2003"). This may be compared to the percentages for other groups with "native tongues" thus: English 85.7%, Chinese 5.9%, Farsi 2.04%. Incidentally, on studying this question, one of our long-time librarians commented, "our Farsi readers are very generous with their book donations". Bravo for them! On our Library's mezzanine floor are twinned alcoves reserved for "Books in Foreign Languages". The one holding only Farsi texts has about 2700 titles on its shelves. The other, reserved for "Other Languages" (with the exception of French texts, which have their own shelves in the West Wing), offers about 3400 titles in many tongues - Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, Spanish, Italian, etc.. In our section reserved for newspapers and magazines, we find about 1150 titles. These include 3 French, 1 Chinese and one Iranian. So the West Vancouver Memorial Library stands quite well equipped to play its part in multiculturalism. And, of course, it is just one source. A most significant nearby source for exchange of information is the Asian Library of U.B.C. For the sake of comparisons, its staff tells me they offer about a quarter-million books, including 150,000 in Japanese and nineteen Asiatic newspapers. Another excellent source in the Internet. Ted Hill