Page 76 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 43

076 Journal of Library Science in China, Vol.9, 2017

different regions have all made efforts to address such issues as government dominance, Borrow
Anywhere, Return Anywhere (BARA) service, technical support and centralized management.
The first key issue is about government dominance. This issue is indeed but not completely an
institutional problem. Without the financial segregation and one library by one-tier government
scheme, there won’t be too many barriers to government domination. Driven by laws of economics,
if the government takes service equalization and professionalized standards into consideration,
it would choose the economical and efficient mode of central and branch library system. With
the financial segregation, as long as it’s in alliance with the will of government, government
domination can still be realized by system design in which institutional barriers are avoided.
Therefore, to achieve the goal of government domination, the government responsibility should
be clarified and it should be included into fiscal budget so as to bypass the institutional barriers. In
fact, government domination was achieved in all the three cases as Shenzhen Library city, Foshan
Chancheng District united library, Jiaxing general and branch library.
The second issue is about building the Borrow Anywhere, Return Anywhere (BARA) service
system. To promote literature resource sharing, Borrow Anywhere, Return Anywhere (BARA)
service is the solution. But with regards of different systematic barriers led by literature asset
rights, the realization of free interlibrary loan system is not easy. The difficulty on the one hand
lies in technical issues, on the other hand comes from the traditional concept that libraries should
take care of their “treasure”. For that, in the construction of central and branch library in different
regions, there were many creative initiatives, such as the “floating collection” in Shanghai and the
“dynamic assets right” in Suzhou.
The third issue refers to technical support. At this stage, the library management system was
developed towards singular library. It is not efficient enough to deal with the complex workflow
of central and branch library system and is also not capable of supporting too many concurrent
users. Since most libraries have no technical capablities to develop library management system,
the branch libraries could only be built on the basis of existing library management systems. For
example, in the case of Suzhou Library, the original target is to set up 20 branches. However, this
goal cannot be achieved due to many factors, with the top restriction being the quantity cap of
concurrent users of ILAS-Ⅱ. For similar reasons, the libraries in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen,
Dongguan and Foshan have spared no efforts to develop and improve their own management
system.
The fourth issue is related to centralized management. Whether or not the centralized
management can be achieved depends on if the central and branch libraries belong to the same
management unit. Without singular service provider, it is quite difficult to realize centralized
management unit. The central and branch libraries are an integral whole from outside and are under
united coordination internally, resulting in the “delegated pattern” of administration in the central
and branch library construction. The more thorough the power is delegated, the closer it is similar
to the same management unit.