Page 17 - Journal of Library Science in China, Vol.45, 2019

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period, and was higher than the growth rate of urban residents’ consumption (12.1%) (An, 2019).
Cultural consumption is playing an increasingly important role in overall consumption and in
promoting economic growth. Studies showed that China’s potential cultural consumer market had
exceeded 4.7 trillion yuan around 2013, but the current cultural supply could only meet less than
one-quarter of this demand (Xi, 2013). In contrast to the strong demand for cultural consumption
and insufficient supply of quality cultural service products, there is a relative oversupply of public
cultural institutions to a certain extent. Supply-side reform in the field of public culture will also be
a practical issue facing the development of Chinese librarianship.
The library sector today has unprecedentedly entered an era of “dramatic changes”. Compared
with other periods in history, driven by advances in science and technology, the library community
is expected to step into disruptive innovation from the state of gradual change. Full preparation
must be made to embrace this new era.

3 Chinese librarianship facing the future: Embarking on a path towards
high-quality development

The human society is in an era of great development, great changes, and great adjustment. The
further development of the world towards multi-polarization, economic globalization, social
informatization, and cultural diversification has brought the library sector into a “window
period” for transformation and development. The traditional strength of library in terms of
resources, services and technology have declined to some extent due to the emergence of massive
heterogeneous resources brought by media integration, the flourishing of multiple information
service platforms under the digital network environment, and the new patterns of information
and cultural communication, such as online learning, open scientific research, and collaborative
innovation. Facing the future, the library sector should take up the challenges of the era,
actively adapting itself to the open and diverse information service competition and cooperation
environment, redefining the library’s role, rebuilding the core advantages of the library, and
seeking innovative development of librarianship from a pioneering and creative perspective.
First, we shall seek ways to protect the new development of diverse civilizations in the era of
digital civilization.
The philosopher Karl Popper once said, “If the world is destroyed and the library is still there, we
can rebuild the world”. Since its birth, memory recording has been the library’s most fundamental
and core function. The inheritance and protection of a state and a nation’s civilization demonstrates
library’s role in recording social memories. In the era of digital civilization, the carriers, channels,
approaches, and methods of recording are undergoing drastic changes. In particular, a considerable
number of civilization achievements born and existing in digital form, and the civilization
memories in people’s minds, are more fragile and difficult to collect systematically, compared with
the documents in the form of traditional media.In my opinion, even in the new era in which digital