Page 206 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 42

Extended English abstracts of articles published in the Chinese edition of Journal of Library Science in China 2016 Vol.42 205

contra-productive to professional public library services,and therefore form a new bottleneck to
the development of a universal public library service for all. It suggests that facilities in township
comprehensive cultural stations be restructured and renamed to enable township public library
service to take shape.

Martin Schrettinger’s thoughts on and contributions to Library Science

XU Yuequan ,XU Zhaoying & LIU Chunli
①a *
The objectives of this study are to summarize the main contents of Schrettinger’s doctrine,to reveal
Martin Schrettinger’s methodology of the discipline construction,and to establish his historical
position as the founder of modern Library Science. We argue in this paper that Schrettinger
constructed the “Library Science” as a new discipline with clear theoretical self-consciousness,and
his doctrine has the salient feature of unifying humanities,science,and technology.
Schrettinger was clearly aware that the major contemporary issues he faced were how to build
good large-scale libraries. His purpose of writing the books was to make Library Science as a new
independent discipline,and only people who had received specialized training in Library Science
were capable of the task of building large-scale libraries. He was the first to propose the idea of
founding Library Science education based on large-scale libraries in 1814.
Schrettinger consciously implemented the humanistic spirit of the European Enlightenment into
the propositions of Library Science,particularly into the three core concepts:“library”,“Library
Science” and “the supreme principle of Library Science”. According to Schrettinger’s
definitions,a library is a large entity of books,whose purpose is to rapidly satisfy all literature
needs. Hence,Library Science is all the precepts necessary to the practical organization of
a library,provided that they are based on sound principles and reducible to one supreme
principle. Since literature needs expressed to a library can only be satisfied through the library
collections,each library facility should be designed to serve the purpose of locating as quickly as
possible the book desired；this certainly should be the supreme principle of Library Science.
Following the ideal paradigm of natural sciences,Schrettinger consciously built Library
Science by attempting to derive all the propositions of the discipline logically from the supreme
principle of Library Science. Of particular interest is that he formulated the principle from the
angle of the literature needs of people,and not from the physical perspective of things. In order
to expand the content of each part of Library Science,he also carefully built up a conceptual
framework that consisted of six basic concepts: Libraries,Library Science,the purpose of library
facilities,the supreme principles of Library Science,the needs that library collections should meet
and the general measures to safeguard satisfaction. It is from the internal logical relationships

* Correspondence should be addressed to XU Yuequan,Email:xu1918@aliyun.com,ORCID:0000-0001-8289-7744