Page 109 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 43

YAN Hui / Structural origins of digital poverty in rural China 109

poverty alleviation needs different strategies for people living in different poor conditions.
Fourth, traditional public-interest information agencies should not be in a vacancy in the
process of digital poverty elimination for rural residents in China. Among the 6 provinces and
municipalities in the fieldwork, apart from Fanchang Public library which assisted county residents
to get away from digital poverty, public libraries were not found at the township or village level.
Due to the lack of sustained and effective operation and management mechanism of village library,
rural residents are deprived of the value preferential treatment of digital poverty. The physical
space, hardware and software conditions of public electronic reading rooms already exist in some
areas such as Anhui and Chongqing. However, due to the lack of personal maintenance, they are
usually maintained by part-time public servants or temporary little village official, resulting in
poor management, low utilization, the actual limited impact. Public information professionals
represented by public libraries have a strong sense of mission in the information society and the
spiritual qualities of humane care, master the law of the information life cycle, and are familiar
with the core skills of effective information search and effective information acquisition. They
should be the best candidates for executives of information poverty alleviation. In addition, public
libraries can also effectively cultivate and increase the stock of local social capital so as to provide
the digital poor people with a low-threshold and high-quality digital environment for poverty
alleviation.
Fifth, for non-profit organizations, digital poverty faced by rural residents is a new form of
poverty that may result in increased levels of traditional poverty and also poses new challenges and
opportunities for them. Their role positioning, charisma and resource scheduling capabilities have
always had a clear advantage in eliminating traditional poverty and are valuable for the digital
poor. The successful experience of information poverty alleviation promoted by the Evergreen
Education Foundation in Tianzhu Tibetan Autonomous County reported in the previous paper (H.
Yan, W.J. Zhou, & Han, 2013) can be treated as a best practice. In particular, how to internalize the
digital resources of public welfare brought by external social capital into the practice of local rural
residents’ internal social capital can provide a reference for the realization of a sustainable digital
poverty alleviation roadmap.
Sixth, the core stakeholders in information poverty alleviation should form a more balanced
relationship in the planning, researching, promulgation, implementation and evaluation of
policies and projects. They should not only adhere to top-down and sustainable information
poverty alleviation policies and programs, but also encourage bottom-up civilian exploration.
For local rural residents, the focus is often on whether external resources can really help, how the
sustainability of these resources is, whether these program design ideas, implementation plans
and processes are in line with their own needs and digitalized poverty conditions, and whether
the effects of the implementation can continually improve their digitalization and their impact
on real-life production. In policy design, all parties should rethink how the input and output in
digital poverty alleviation can be measured more objectively and how to increase the digitization