Today is an early dismissal day at nearby Lincoln Elementary, but no matter what day it is, said Jane Courant, the children's librarian, the foot traffic always picks up after school when many young people have downtime before Chinese school begins.

"After school there's easily a hundred kids here. We run out of chairs. They are on the floor," said Courant, who has worked at the branch for six years. "This place is a real refuge for some kids. They like hanging out here."

Considering the modest scale of the one-floor space — equal to about the size of four elementary school classrooms — it is hard to imagine that many children assembled here at the same time.

But on a normal Saturday more than 200 adults and youth cram into the space to soak up the library's

74,000 books, newspapers, magazines, and audiovisual materials in eight Asian languages plus English, Courant added. The branch celebrated its 30th anniversary this year.

On weekdays, library staff process at least 2,400 books and audio materials a day. That number can reach as high as 4,000 on weekends. That is more than all the Oakland branches combined, said Courant, who added overworked staff struggle to keep up on reshelving the high-traffic collection. At the front of the library is a small reading room with three round tables full of elderly men and women quietly reading Asian-language newspapers. The library has a large selection of magazines and newspapers in a variety of Asian languages, especially Chinese.

"There are people who go there every single day to read the newspaper," Tracey Scott, chair of the Oakland Neighborhood Libraries Coalition.

Currently, there are just eight computers that provide public Internet access at the branch. The branch does boast a small computer lab, funded by an outside grant, where new immigrants and the elderly learn basic computer skills in weekly classes taught in Cantonese, Mandarin, and Korean.

"We always have a waiting list for people wanting to take that class," said Courant.

A staff of three full-time librarians bilingual in Chinese and English and a team of part-time library assistants oversee and maintain the collections in Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, Thai, Korean, Cambodian, Tagalog, and Laotian. Chinese language books for adults and "manga" young adult books are among the most popular books among patrons at the branch.

Since its founding in the mid-1970s through a federal program funding the construction of libraries, the branch has moved its location three times to keep up with the high demand for its services — first from its original Park Boulevard site to the basement of the Main Library in 1978, then to a Chinatown storefront at 9th and Broadway in 1981, and finally in 1996, to the Pacific Renaissance plaza, its current location on 9th between Franklin and Webster streets.

Three Saturdays a month, Courant — who spent 20 years as an actor and director in Chicago before beginning her librarian career — holds a bilingual story time in Chinese (two weeks in Cantonese, one in Mandarin) with the help of a translator. She said as many as 70 adults and children attend regularly.

Scott said the Asian branch is one of many citywide examples that underscore the continued importance of providing library services to the public.

Libraries "really have become community centers," she said. "It's not just about books anymore."

''After school there's easily a hundred kids here. We run out of chairs. They are on the floor." Jane Courant Children's Librarian, Asian Library

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