Page 64 - Journal of Library Science in China, Vol.45, 2019

YE Jiyuan / Eight major problems in the development of the librarianship in China 063

was passed by the 12th National People’s Congress on June 27, 2017. The laws in the archive and
information fields do not target at certain systems and types. Although there is not comparability
between the archive, the information and the library communities, the fact is that regulations
on academic libraries are released by the Educational Department, rather than legislated by the
National Congress (the highest organ of state power). Most major developed countries have library
laws such as the British Library Act, the Federal Law of Libraries in the Russian Federation. In
consequence, we believe that we should continue to develop a good library legal environment in
both practice and theory. We should advance the legislation for all types of libraries, and amend
some provisions such as professional education, academic degree and treatment of professional
librarians and directors. Detailed implementation policies should be formulated to put into practice
the allocations, buildings and collections prescribed by the law in public libraries, especially in
the county-level and underdeveloped districts, which will help to construct complete library legal
system and guarantee the sustainable development of librarianship.

3 How to deal with the application of new technologies

In recent years, new technologies such as the Internet, big data and a new generation of artificial
intelligence make astounding advances. The new technologies are applied in many fields including
the library community. For example, Nanjing University Library developed robots “Tubao”
to check the number of books and to provide reference service (Gao & Shu, 2017); Tsinghua
University Library developed robots to check in books in its main and branch libraries (Xinhuanet.
2018). Those robots have been put into practice. It is reasonable to believe that the further
development of artificial intelligence will improve the efficiency and level of library management,
and elevate the professional and service abilities. In the near future, simple, repetitive and even
inferential work could be replaced. However, much effort should be made to automatically filter,
analyze and evaluate scholarly resources in the semantic sense and to enhance the precision of
automatic abstraction, classification and indexing to the professional level. The basic theory of
artificial intelligence calls for a breakthrough. Man-machine interaction will be normal in the
high-level information and knowledge service and management in the library. Some traditional
posts will be superseded by artificial intelligence robots. Yet new challenging posts related to
information and knowledge will emerge. It does not mean that the library will perish. On the
contrary, the library will become more significant. The expected “Third-generation Libraries”, “Post
Libraries”, “Libraries Beyond Libraries” and “Smart Library” will come into being. Whatever they
are called, they are subject to libraries or similar institutions. The history of the library is actually
“that of making full advantage of technological development, and of elevating service abilities and
contributions”, and “New technological reforms provide us with more potentials and resources”
(Zhang, 2018). The library has been developing with the help of new technologies, from book
catalog to card catalog, punch card to MARC, paper document to digital resource, automatic