Page 42 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 44

XIA Lixin, BAI Yang & ZHANG Xinyi / Integration and reconstruction: A new development pattern of the smart library 041

The library realizes that the core of its service should be transferred to “people”, paying attention
to the knowledge needs of users at any time and improving the service ability of librarians. Then,
the shift from “people” to “space” is actually still the continuation of “people” in “space”. In the
Internet era, users have more and more access to information. Users pay more attention to whether
the “space” of the library suitable for communication than knowledge acquisition and learning.
Consequently, the library begins to pay attention to the space construction based on the changes of
users’ new demands.
Therefore, with the change in the environment of the times, the focus of the library has
experienced a shift from “resource” to “people” and to “space”. Further more, the analysis of the
internal changes reveals that “resource”, “people” and “spaces” achieve a multi-level development
centering on the use and dissemination of knowledge.
1) Changes in “resource”. In terms of “resource”, the objective of the library has changed
from collecting to using. In the beginning, human beings recorded the activities and results of
understanding the objective world. Due to the lack of technology, it could not be well stored and
disseminated. Therefore, the library pavilion or library has become a holy place for preserving
the record of human civilization. The function of the library is only collecting. While with the
explosive growth of knowledge, the limited space of the library cannot store a large number of
resources. And the library can only meet the knowledge demand of most readers according to the
“80/20 law”, purchasing new physical and virtual resources and discarding old ones (J.Xu & Q.Y.
Huang, 2007).When library resources are nearly saturated, knowledge resources with rich contents
and various forms become a unique advantage for library to carry out knowledge innovation. By
virtue of the professional advantages of librarians and the integration of the innovative talents
of potential user groups or related institutions, library starts to experiment with the knowledge
innovation services such as digital publishing (Mullins, Murray-Rust, Ogburn, Crow, & Ivins,
2012).
2) Changes in “people”. There are three levels of development with “people” as elements. First
of all, the library has just begun to provide service focusing on library visitors’ needs, and the
value of the library can be realized by satisfying the needs of readers. Secondly, the library is
social and cannot exist in its own closed space separated from the society. So the library gradually
brings relevant stakeholders and potential users into its service scope (J.S. Liu & J.Z.Wu, 2012),
and takes the initiative to carry out a wider range of knowledge dissemination activities. Thirdly,
while the library stores explicit knowledge, each person’s tacit knowledge formed due to different
social experiences and different thinking about knowledge is also a kind of private wealth. So
the combination of “human” resources and library resources is conducive to the dissemination
of library knowledge and the innovative development of human knowledge. In recent years, the
extensive “real person library” activity is the maximum exploration of the knowledge value formed
by the combination of human and knowledge.
3) Changes in “space”. The library takes “space” as the key factor in the development and