Page 39 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 43

On accelerating the renaissance of public libraries in

Central China

1〇a *
LI Guoxin & ZHANG Yong 2
1 Department of Information Management, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
2 Hunan Library, Changsha, Hunan Province 410011, China

Abstract
Since the implementation of the 12th Five-Year Plan in 2011, public libraries in Central
China have been slow-growing in the Central lowland. There are four main manifestations:
disproportionate resources to the population served, relatively slow development speed, low level
of equalization and rising comparable service costs. To revitalize public libraries in Central China,
efforts should be made in the following aspects: macro adjustments of national policy, specifying
and strengthening the main responsibilities of local governments, speeding up the construction
of the central-branch system of public libraries on the county level, expanding and deepening the
application of Library+ and Internet+, improving the guiding function of evaluations and seizing
the historic opportunity to promote the construction of the public cultural service system in
underprivileged areas.

Key words
Public libraries, Modern public cultural service system, Central lowland

0 Introduction

In September and October 2015, the public library alliance of Hunan Province, Hubei Province,
Jiangxi Province and Anhui Province conducted a survey of the development of grassroots public
libraries. Cases and data of the survey were analyzed, and development indicators of public
libraries in Central, Eastern and Western China were compared. The result showed that compared
with the continuous growth of public libraries in Eastern China and the rapid development of
public libraries in Western China, public libraries in Central China represented by the provinces
of Hunan, Hubei, Jiangxi and Anhui had reflected a distinct gap since the 12th Five-Year
Plan. In consequence, the traditional ranking from the East, the Central to the West in terms of
developmental level was broken, and has shifted to the East, the West and the Central, which is

* Correspondence should be addressed to LI Guoxin, Email:ligx@pku.edu.cn,ORCID: 0000-0003-0616-0438