Page 38 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 44

Integration and reconstruction: A new development

pattern of the smart library〇a
①

〇b *
XIA Lixin〇 , BAI Yang & ZHANG Xinyi
School of Information Management, Central China Normal University, Wuhan 430079, China

Abstract
The smart library is a new trend in the development of libraries, and an important concept of the library
community. At present, the research and practice of smart libraries are mostly carried out under the
principle of “technology first”, which has not yet explored fundamentally what is the smartness of
libraries and what smart support do people need in knowledge acquisition.
In the change of service focus, the libraries of the past generations demonstrated the core ideas of
using knowledge and technology as the driving force and constantly adapting to the changes of users’
needs. By analyzing the nature of human beings in smart activities and their core needs, this study
proposes a smart library concept that integrates the three core elements of “resource”, “people” and
“space” to build a smart service model to support user intelligence activities. The future development of
the smart library should be based on the construction of the individual smart library environment, and
further working for the smartness of the “big library”.

Keywords
Smart library, Smart service, Space perception, Knowledge network, Smart environments

0 Introduction

The essence of library service is knowledge service according to the users’ needs, yet the form of
knowledge service in different social backgrounds has been constantly changing and innovating. At
the same time, many librarians are continuously exploring the forms and directions of knowledge
service of future libraries with a vision of the library’s development. During the period of the
Reform Movement, Liang Qichao put forward a vision of library construction “wide-informed and
open-minded” in response to the secluded knowledge environment at that time in China (Tuo &
Hu,1992). Ranganathan’s “The Five Laws of Library Science” (Ranganathan,1988) put forward the
guiding goals for the construction of modern libraries, and had become one of the classic principles
guiding the development of libraries. During the Anti-Japanese War, Shen Zurong proposed that
the library should become a “permanent and active educational institution that cultivates reason”
to “educate people and strengthen the power of anti-Japanese and national instruction” (Shen,

① This article is an outcome of the major project “Research on Knowledge Discovery of the Internet Resource Based on Multi-
dimensional Aggregation” (No.13&ZD183) supported by National Social Science Foundation of China.
* Correspondence should be addressed to XIA Lixin, Email: xialx@mail.ccnu.edu.cn, ORCID: 0000-0002-4162-2282