Page 57 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 42

056 Journal of Library Science in China, Vol. 8, 2016

(1) The reading resources production stage. It is required to establish targeted specifications on
design and compilation of high quality reading materials, and develop evaluation criteria of high
quality reading materials to determine if the content is normative, interesting, informative, and
instructive.
(2) The reading resources transfer stage. It should set assessment standards on library service
network and commercial book service system, which would evaluate if the book distribution
is effective and diversified. At the same time, it should develop evaluation criteria on nonprofit
reading facilities, like libraries and village libraries, and commercial reading facilities, like
bookstores and book kiosks, to assess the building space, collection resources and other indicators
of various kinds of reading facilities.
(3) The reading resources usage stage, i.e. the national reading’s service effectiveness. It consists
of the national reading status, feedback and literacy, which can assess the overall social impact and
individual benefits of national reading.

3.3 The assurance for promoting national reading

(1) The operability of the national reading assessment standard
The national reading assessment standard should be operable and practicable. It could take the
existing standards concerning national reading for reference, such as the relevant theories and
practices of public culture service system evaluation, along with the evaluations on commercial
reading facilities, to evaluate the dissemination and distribution of reading materials as a whole.
The differences in the national reading system construction among regions and sectors should
be taken into consideration as well. The bottom-up strategy of “specificity-localization-publicness”
could be applied to develop the national reading assessment standard (H. Z. Wang, Tong, & M. Q.
Xu, 2006).Initially, it should set the evaluation criteria for primary units, which would take primary
libraries as the main part and develop the tertiary evaluation of county, town and village for
public libraries as a priority; then, extract the features of regional and industrial national reading
to develop the national reading assessment standard within a region or sector; finally, select the
common indicators to develop the assessment at the national level.
(2) Establish the data collection and statistical mechanism of nation reading
To ensure the indicators objective and effective, it is necessary to establish the long-term,
normative and sustainable data collection and statistical mechanism that could track and examine
the indicators continually. For instance, the mechanism may track the input and output of the
infrastructure in libraries and bookstores, or conduct follow-up surveys on the reading literacy of
children and adolescents. Firstly, it should improve the data recording, preservation and disclosure,
develop statistics database, collect relevant data and publish them regularlys every year. Secondly,
long-term cooperation with third-party organizations, like library and information science schools