Page 235 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2015 Vol. 41

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

“description” includes two procedures: the first is to understand, abstract and conceptualize the
properties featured in bibliographic objects; the second is to represent the properties with semiotic
system such as a kind of written language. So the nature of authority control is to construct a
relation between the conceptualization and the representation. Bibliographic system should provide
a authority control mechanism to strictly conform to the consistency of concept representation, and
make it independent of people, time or other environmental factors.
The emerging semantic Web technology has just provided an excellent platform for authority
control. The Linked Data technology offers an abstract model to separate the concept from its
representation. It provides a capability to search all the attribute fields in bibliographic records
as controlled values. Authority files can be encoded with RDF, SKOS or OWL schema. Thus, all
cataloguing rules and specific rules (RDA/AACR2) can be encoded with semantic statements and
integrated into the process of authority control.
Many international organizations are implementing and providing authority control services
with semantic technologies, such as, BIBFRAME of Library of Congress, VIAF project of OCLC,
Open Authority project, Wikidata project, etc. These projects reflect a trend that the knowledge
organization experiences of traditional libraries are still valuable for the information management
in the internet era. The merits of bibliographic control in librarianship have contributed a lot to
our society in history, and it will be still enlightening our civilization with the new information
technology and foster our career to the utmost.

Public libraries in the modern public cultural service system
1 ∗
Zhinan WU & Jia FENG

After more than a hundred years’ development, public libraries have entered a rising period marked
by government participation and public service-orientation in recent years. In this context and from
the perspective of modern public culture service system, the overall public librarianship has some
problems to be solved, such as facility layout with rigidified administration which is difficult to
meet the urban development, construction system in accordance with the administrative hierarchy
which is not good for the folk forces’ participation, isolated operation which is not adaptable to the
concept of modern public cultural “equalization”, backward services which are not adaptable to
the modern digital network technology and the way of modern public reading services and so on.
Based on these problems, with the strong support of government to public services in the
growing economic power, and with a favorable central policy environment and development
opportunities, and underneath the modern public cultural service system, some new requirements
should be fulfilled in order to realize the transformation and upgrading development of China’s

* Correspondence should be addressed to WU Zhinan, Email: zhinanwu@126.com, ORCID: 0000-0001-9845-7567