Page 46 - Journal of Library Science in China, Vol.45, 2019

KE Ping & ZOU Jinhui / Library transformation in the post-knowledge service era 045

was “touched” by the cloud in 2013. By 2020, that percentage will double to 40%. The total data in
2013 reached 4.4 ZB. By 2020, the data will reach 44 ZB, which is expected to double every two
years. Seagate (2018a), the world’s largest manufacturer of hard disks, estimates that data volumes
will reach 163 ZB by 2025, ten fold of 16.1 ZB in 2016. “While we can see from this new research
that the era of big data is upon us, the value of data is really not in the ‘known’, but in the ‘unknown’
where we are vastly underestimating the potentials today.” said Seagate (2018b) CEO Steve Luczo.
The big data concept is being implemented more rapidly. Yet it still needs more time to mine the
driving force of data value, reconstruct operation flow, move from scattered data to data insight,
and truly achieve data-driven.
Despite the rise of knowledge technology in the pre-knowledge service era, this technology
is still an extension of information technology, a new generation of information technology that
enhances the ability to deal with knowledge, and a key technology of the third revolution of the
Internet to realize semantic web as the core (M.Z. Zeng, 2005). In the post-knowledge service
era, the boundary of technology becomes blurred. Knowledge technology, or smart technology,
is a new generation of knowledge technology, which integrates various new technologies on the
basis of knowledge description technology, knowledge transformation technology and knowledge
transfer technology. It not only can be applied to the whole process of knowledge production,
but also to the whole life cycle of knowledge: collection, processing, dissemination, retrieval,
provision, utilization, maintenance and governance. A new generation of knowledge technology
will drive the library to pay more attention to diversification, experience and wisdom, and finally
accomplish the transformation from the digital library and the hybrid library to intelligent service
and the smart library.

2.2 Demand drive

In the era of information service, the basic concept of demand-oriented and user-centered library
has been established. In the pre-knowledge service era, under the influence of generation Y,
Google generation and digital natives on libraries, the user demands have become the driving force
of the library transformation, resulting in Lib2.0 and Lib3.0. In the post-knowledge service era, in
addition to the further strengthening of user demands, the social demand and industry competition
have become important forces driving the transformation.
From the perspective of social needs, the influence of economy on the transformation of
library is the most direct. Internationally, economic development, especially the development of
knowledge economy, depends more on libraries. “The Campaign to Save America’s Libraries”
in 2003 (Xu & Shi, 2006) and the British “Survival of Public Libraries”in 2010 (Liu & Huang,
2018) show that the weak economic growth and worries of fiscal decline make the library faced
with budget reduction or even closure, which requires library changes and transformation. Other
factors such as culture, education, and politics in the new era will also put forward new and