Page 161 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 43

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Extended English abstracts of articles published in the Chinese edition of Journal of Library Science in China 2017 Vol.43 161

and satisfy oneself by gaining knowledge.
With the advance in society, the media format that carries literature changes. But the change
in media format doesn’t have a decisive effect on users’ utilization of literature contents. The
producer of the literature contents either writes on paper or uses some forms of digital device. The
difference is that the digitalized storage of literature contents provides the original form of the
authorized literature on a digital screen.
Information management is a fundamental method that humans use to regulate things.
Ancient rulers found out such management tools based on the need to rule the society. Applying
information management method to the literature management in socialized nature originated from
Liu Xiang and Liu Yin, father and son, during the Han Dynasty. “To record” is an important way
to systematically managing the literature contents in Chinese traditional literature management.
Literature specialist Zhang Xuecheng from Qing Dynasty summarized it as “defend and debate the
nature of literature, investigate its origin and formation”. When a compiler “records”, he not only
records the contents of the book but also defines what specialized academic field it belongs to, as
well as the value, the ranking of the piece, its origination and its impact on the society.
The term “knowledge management” confuses the librarian, because it mixes the daily activity
of “absorbing knowledge through reading” with the coded information recorded in written format
which is “knowledge”. The process of reading, in fact, is a special process that the reader goes
through during the “information interaction” between personal cultural knowledge and the coded
information literature provided. Readers “gain knowledge” through the process of “information
interaction”. Even intellectuals who receive library’s “knowledge services” must go through
the same process of reading literature, interacting with coded information on media, and finally
gaining knowledge. Services provided by librarians can’t replace this process.
As the library encounters a literature and data explosion in ever-multiplying digital databases,
it should formulate a scientific method to judge the value of literature and select an appropriate
system to store and preserve it. It is a new challenge that contemporary libraries face, and it should
be the goal of Library Science research to rise up to this challenge.
The librarian should use techniques such as factual research method, comprehensive analysis in
applied contents, analytical methods for quotation, as well as h&r index analysis to systematically
analyze the shortage or shortcomings of library holdings in collection development so that a more
comprehensive and complete collection of literature resources can be obtained. Such specialized
exploration may lead the breakthrough in the basic capacity in socialized literature management.
Instead of the traditional linear model in extracting and categorizing information from a single
document, the library can focus on the specialized literature group, find out the development path
in core literature, and define the valuable literature within such a specialized group. Coincidently,
this method matches the theory of our traditional cataloging concept of “defending and debating
the nature of literature, investigating its origin and formation”.