Page 44 - 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 043

The Five Laws of Library Science by Ranganathan. However, in recent years, the library has paid
much more attention to ontology, informatization and networking than to library users (Lancaster,
2011), resulting in the disorientation of “people”. If the library ignores the needs of the society,
separated from the people-oriented nature, it can only be an empty shell, and then abandoned
by users. Therefore, the library should adhere to the fundamental people-oriented concept, track
the needs of users and changes of social environment, and constantly adjust itself to meet new
development needs.
3)The supporting technology is the driving force of library reform. The development of libraries
in the past is inseparable from the application of science and technology. In the recent decade,
digital storage and dissemination, Internet and other technologies have made the changes of
libraries more than the total changes in the past 100 years. Without technology-driven, the library’s
knowledge organization, management coordination and user service will all be delayed due to the
lack of guarantees. But we cannot over-emphasize technology. When we build a library with the
banner of “technology first”, we forget who the library serves (Fang, 2010). Libraries are useless
when they break away from their values or goals. Technology cannot help libraries to realize their
significance, yet technology still plays an important role in libraries. Therefore, the application
of library technology must center on the needs of library users. Although the application of
technology that deviates from this principle will bring a temporary prosperity to the library, it will
lose users’ trust over time.
The library is the guardian and disseminator of knowledge, born with the mission of enlightening
intelligence. Although the library has been confronted with various development problems, it has
always been the beneficiary of actively transforming itself and making changes, which makes the
digital library brilliant (Zhang, 2001). Therefore, the library must continue to take the initiative to
make changes and return to the original intention of smart services. This means that the study of
the smart library development needs to be carried out on the premise of adhering to the core “user-
oriented” concept of and clarifying the existing problems of knowledge services. Focused on the
essence of smartness, the study will continue to explore how to activate the library’s capabilities of
smart service and support the construction of smart libraries with appropriate technical means.

2 Reidentify the smartness of the library

The construction of a smart library needs to make clear that its construction is carried out under the
concept of “people” as the core at first. That is to say, it should start from the connotation of human
intelligence and focus on the core needs of users, and discuss the smart service of library on the
basis of how to meet the increasingly rich knowledge acquisition needs of users. Fundamentally,
the library’s smart service is based on people’s intelligence activities to explore what is smartness
of the library, and how to integrate and refactor the three elements of “resource”, “people” and
“space” in the context of the social environment.