Page 25 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2015 Vol. 41

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

public library in the recent ten years has already altered its past backward situation. In fact, some
accomplishments can be considered as superior even compared with those developed countries, and
climb up to the top level in the world. Generally, the improvement of service efficiency has been
ranked as a critical task in the construction of modern public cultural service system. Much more
than this, the great achievement and exponential growth of the service efficiency have come into
realization in the developed areas in Eastern China. Since the 3rd Plenary Session of the 18th CPC
Central Committee in 2013, some explorations with new thoughts, innovated methods, powerful
implementation and excellent outcomes have been initiated. One example is that the public library
at Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region has begun to carry out a “Rainbow Service Plan”, an
online platform that organically connects public library system and book-retailing network, which
hands the decision-making process of book procurement over to users. Even though the traditional
operation flow in the public library has been thoroughly altered, the “seamless link” between users’
needs and library resources has been tightened, because the circulation rate of newly-purchased
books amazingly reaches at 100% (Zhang, 2015). There is no denying that the “Rainbow Service
Plan” breaks new ground to improve the circulation rate of books, particularly for middle and
small-sized public libraries in China. Another example is the Suzhou public library’s “Three-year
Plan to Achieve Great-leap-forward Improvement of Service Efficiency”, also known as the “Plan
of Achieving Ten 100%”. This plan aims at improving the following ten aspects of public library
services, such as the coverage rate of public library facilities between urban and rural areas, the
proportion of effective readers in the total population, library visits per capita, the loan rate of
newly-purchased books, the participation rate of national reading activities, etc., at an amazing rate
of 100% within three years. By the end of this plan, most of the services listed above will reach
a high level domestically, and some of them will jump to an international advanced level (Wang,
2015). Explorations like these have already significantly accelerated the progress of improving the
overall service efficiency of Chinese public library.

4 To take in social power as developing impetus

From the outset, the principles of guiding and encouraging the participation of social power
in modern public cultural service have been established. Since the 3rd Plenary Session of the
18th CPC Central Committee, social powers have been highlighted as an indispensable impetus
for constructing a socialized development of public cultural services. Obviously, the roles and
functions of social powers are not merely constrained to participation. In the Views, socialized
development of public cultural service has been expounded and deployed from a very high status
as social impetus, which underpins a fact that socialized development is an intrinsic character of
modern public cultural service system rather than an alternative or a substitution. In this case,
the socialized development of public cultural services can be regarded as theoretical sublimation,
which continuously brings a series of revolution and creation to the construction of the modern