Page 55 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 44

054 Journal of Library Science in China, Vol.10, 2018

in the innovative services of traditional culture.
In brief, the library plays an important role in supporting social development. Under the
guidance of the concept of “activating demand, activating knowledge, integrating into the society,
and serving the society” (J.Z. Wu, 2010), the library should extend its intelligence to support social
development. The higher the recognition and dependence of the society on the library’s smart
services, the greater the value of the library, which in turn will encourage the library to actively
seek new tasks and use the smart capabilities to promote social progress.

4.3 Promoting sustainable innovation through demand

The society and people are constantly evolving and changing, and the knowledge content and
forms of knowledge service in demand are constantly innovating, too. Therefore, the library
needs to stick to sustainable innovation, adhere to the essence and concept of smart service,
and constantly transform its own smart service environment. Meanwhile, libraries need to
take the initiative to carry out breakthrough innovations that bring new significant benefits to
users, and make an indispensable contribution in areas that users urgently need (Zhang, 2011).
Simultaneously, the driving force of libraries’ innovation is in the changing needs of users. The
users’ needs are step by step rather than by leaps and bounds, so the library is required to gradually
explore and utilize all aspects of resources and technical capabilities to continuously meet the
needs of users as the society develops (Zhang, 2006).Fundamentally speaking, the process of
continuously transforming library smart service is essentially a contradiction cycle between
human cognitive needs and knowledge-centered services. In form it is expressed as the new user
demand’s “negation of negation” of the existing service content, while in content it reflects the
transformation process of human being’s understanding of the objective world’s quantitative
change into the qualitative change. At the intersection where change is needed, the library can
make breakthroughs and progress by clarifying its core development concept, actively exploring
unknown areas in accordance with needs of users, and providing knowledge services that can bring
new significant benefits to users and meet their urgent needs.

5 Conclusion

In recent years, the library community has held extensive discussions of the forms of the smart
library. The mainstream view is to apply the current hot technology of big data, Internet of Things,
artificial intelligence and others to construct libraries so as to make libraries more automated and
intelligent. However, the “technical first” idea may make the library deviate from the “people-
oriented” concept and the fundamentals of knowledge services, which is not conducive to the
healthy development of the library. This paper explores what the smartness of the library is and
how to activate the smart services of the library based on the core development concept of the