Page 46 - 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 045

collective interaction and participation.
2) The library’s smartness beyond smart technologies
From the perspective of knowledge, we can see that intelligence is the process in which people
learn, reflect and create knowledge. Human beings are the main body of intelligence, so the
intelligence of the library should be to assist and promote the process of human intelligence, to
fully mobilize all subjective and objective forces to help users carry out intelligent activities. On
the one hand, it needs to construct the conditions for individuals to carry out intellectual activities.
On the other hand, it should try to stimulate the intelligence and creativity of the collective to
enhance the value of the library. The library helps people realize their intelligence, that is, to realize
their own wisdom and to practice the core user-oriented concept.
Therefore, the discussion and practice of the smart library cannot be limited to the application of
smart devices and technologies, which could bring more convenient and intelligent service to the
library. Although intelligent technology can make the library more efficient, its application cannot
really make the library smart. The library service independent of the knowledge-based intellectual
activities cannot be the true smartness of the library service. Technical smartness should only be
the means and methods serving smart service of library, not the original intention of building a
smart library. Therefore, the construction of a smart library should revise the existing mainstream
“smart” concept, focus on the integration and reconstruction of the core elements of the library,
and discuss how to provide a smart environment to users and activate users’ intelligence activities
based on the users’ need for intelligence activities through knowledge.

2.2 The intellectual needs of library users

The users’ intelligence needs are essentially the demand for knowledge acquisition, which
is mainly reflected in the intelligence activities that affect users’ cognitive construction and
innovation from the aspects of knowledge content and knowledge environment. And in the context
of massive resource environment and the opening era, users’ needs for knowledge content and
knowledge environment are also constantly changing.
1) Intensive knowledge needs
Although the physical and virtual resources of the current library are abundant, it is still difficult
to meet the knowledge needs of users. There are two main reasons. From the users’ point of view,
users are faced with massive fragmented information resources, and few can completely access and
read all the related resources in even quite a small field. And users often hope to directly acquire
fine-grained knowledge or knowledge systems in a specific field, and even hope to obtain support
for exploration, discovery, and analysis based on massive data instead of searching and identifying
wanted knowledge from massive resources by themselves and taking a lot of time and efforts
to extract knowledge through reading and understanding. What is more, in terms of immediacy,
the library still cannot meet the users’ requirements for rapid update of new knowledge. The