Page 23 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2015 Vol. 41

022 Journal of Library Science in China, Vol. 7, 2015

As a “bottom line”, the National guiding standard only states some generalized content and
categories. Thus, the local government needs to figure out detailed local standards with exact
quantities and precise requirements. At current stage, the Ministry of Culture has announced that
provincial government will publish Local standard at the end of August 2015, and municipal and
county government will then publish detailed scheme of implementation at the end of 2015 as
second tier (Ministry of Culture of the People’s Republic of China, 2015).
Another important initiative to reinforce the balanced development between urban and rural
areas is to push forward the construction of central-branch library system and cultural centers
at the county level. As early as 2008, it was proven that county level was the most suitable
managerial layer to propel central-branch system based on enormous practices and explorations
in the public library system (Li, 2008; Qiu, Yu, & Xu, 2008), which has laid profound foundation
to its construction and future promotion nowadays. Moreover, another important task for the
public library in the future is to improve the management and enhance the service efficiency of the
Farmers’ Reading Room within the central-branch system at county level so that the integration of
various resources and balanced service quality between urban and rural areas can be accomplished.
Regarding to this, two significant practical explorations have been performed at current stage:
Jiangsu Province has set up some pilots to integrate Farmers’ Reading Room into the central-
branch public library system (Yao, 2015). Jiaxing in Zhejiang Province has created a specific
Resource and Service Management System of Farmers’ Reading Room with an interconnected
platform inside the public library system (Bureau of Culture, Broadcasting, Television, Press and
Publication of Jiaxing, 2015).

3 To improve service efficiency

With the improvement of facilities, resources and supportive policies, how to improve the service
efficiency of public cultural services has become an urgent and pressing issue. Documents reported
at the 18th CPC Central Committee (Hu, 2012) have laid great emphases on the improvement
of service efficiency and the perfection of the holistic service system, which was followed by
the Decision of the CPC Central Committee on some major issues concerning comprehensively
deepening the reform (2013), another significant policy that requires public assessment and
feedback to achieve higher service efficiency between cultural-beneficial programs and public
demands. Therefore, the Views primarily addresses the importance of improving the efficiency
of public cultural services when launching public cultural products and providing public cultural
supplies. According to the Views, the following three main methods should be adopted by the
public library to improve service efficiency.
Firstly, and most importantly, the cooperation among different departments and industries should
be further explored and expanded in order to provide free access to the resources of Worker’s
Culture Hall, Youth Activity Center, Activity Center for Women and Children, and educational