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008 Journal of Library Science in China, Vol.11, 2019

services. Due to this national condition, as an institutional arrangement, China has been developing
a rural cultural network and building reading rooms and libraries in rural areas since 1950s. In June
1980, the Secretariat of the Communist Party of China passed the Outline of the Report on Library
Services (2014), making it clear that “a nationwide library service network shall be established”. As
of the end of the 11th Five-year plan period (2006-2010), the objective of “establishing a library in
each county” has basically been completed. On this basis, the National Development and Reform
Commission (NDRC) launched a project for building comprehensive cultural centers and libraries
in rural areas. The State Council made plans for developing public cultural services in villages and
communities in 2015, pointing out that “lending and reading services of public libraries should
be improved in villages and communities, as well as in areas where service quality is in need of
improvement” (“Guiding opinions of the General Office of the State Council on pushing forward
the building of the grassroots comprehensive cultural service centers”, 2015). Under this policy
guidance, the lending and reading service facilities of public libraries below the county level has
been constantly improved.
Recent years have also witnessed preliminary attempts made in economic developed areas for
establishing a public library service system. In the Yangtze River Delta region and Pearl River
Delta region, based on such indicators as service radius and population covered, several public
library service models have been built, including the “Library City” of Shenzhen, “City Study
Room” of Wenzhou, as well as typical central-branch library system models, such as the Suzhou
Model in Jiangsu province and Jiaxing Model in Zhejiang province. The development of central-
branch library service system at the county level, with the county-level library as the central
library and comprehensive cultural service centers in towns and villages as branch libraries, has
been included as part of the central government documents and national statute. The six-level
public library service system that covers the state, provinces (municipalities), cities, townships
(communities) and villages (communities) has been fundamentally established. As the end of 2017,
China has set up a total of 19,000 branches of public libraries and equipped 17,000 mobile library
vans (“Statistical communiqué of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the People’s Republic of
China on cultural development in 2017”, 2018). The number of people who use the mobile library
service has reached 27.04 million, borrowing 46.7 million volumes (Library Society of China &
National Library of China, 2018). In the meantime, with the provision of unmanned city library
service and 24-hour self-service facilities, library resources and services have been effectively
covered in both the urban and rural areas.

1.3 Realizing technology-driven transformation towards a digital and network-based
library system

Since 1990s, a series of digital library programs have been implemented at both the national
and regional level. National projects include the National Digital Library Project and National