Page 255 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2015 Vol. 41

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

reading barriers is the key resolving strategy. From the perspective of Library Science theory
development, this study reveals the complexity of implementing and encouraging reading among
rural residents, who not only have distinctive and multiple layers of reading requirements, but
also are proven to be difficult to engage in in-depth reading processes. This finding indicates
that it is critical to provide personalized and specialized reading services. Based on the analysis,
useful implications to the establishment of innovative services are articulated. Furthermore, this
paper extends and contributes to the existing theories, understandings and practices of library
reading services and rural library development. Moreover, this study identifies special and unique
reading characteristics and behaviors of rural residents. In this study, two main problems were
identified and confirmed, namely, subjective selective reading, and non-reading. These results are
particularly valuable to improve the current service delivery approaches and to the provision of
specialized services.
However, due to the survey focused on the rural ethnic minority regions, the survey findings
are limited by the selection of research sample. Moreover, this paper does not provide any
specific suggestions and strategies to improve the reading rate in rural areas, which can be
articulated in future works. Finally, more research attentions should be paid to the lack of reading
in rural areas.

Research progress in public digital cultural resources integration
1 ∗
Ximing XIAO & Qiaoyuan LIU

Since the 1990s, a number of researchers and institutes abroad have initiated research investigations
and practical implementation of the integration of public digital cultural resources. In fact, the
research and practice in overseas countries have undergone three main stages: cooperation and co-
construction, resource sharing, and knowledge sharing. In the 21st century, even greater attention
has been placed on the study of public digital cultural resources integration. This paper reports on
a research investigation aiming at analyzing and discussing the origin and historical development
of public digital cultural resources integration in foreign countries. Moreover, this paper focuses on
the newly emerged research areas in the field, namely, life-cycle management of digital resources,
emerging technologies and applications, as well as the formulation of metadata standards.
Furthermore, this paper aims to provide useful implications to the study of public digital cultural
resources integration in China.
This paper adopts Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) as the data source, which was
systematically searched using relevant keywords. The articles were retrieved, manually screened
and selected for analysis. The selected articles report a long period of history, represent diverse

* Correspondence should be addressed to Ximing XIAO, Email: xxmwhu2011@163.com, ORCID: 0000-0002-0715-6038