Page 24 - Journal of Library Science in China 2020 Vol.46

LI Yuhai, JIN Zhe, LI Jiahui & LI Jue / Five questions in the construction of smart library in China 023

concepts, technologies, services and management. The earliest research outcome in China is the
article published by YAN (2010) titled “Smart library based on the Internet of Things”, which
proposed that smart library could enable smart service and management through the Internet
of Things, which was the integration of library, Internet of Things, cloud computing and smart
facilities. S. W. WANG (2011) proposed that smart library is a more advanced version from
intelligent library, which was a new library service mode based on information technologies and
centered on ubiquitous, convenient and time-space spanning reader services. WEI, LIAO, and
M. SHEN (2017) believed that creating smart library applications has become a new direction
of mobile library services, and proposed three principles for designing such applications.
Library staff are more focused on the new technological products, construction approaches and
strategies of smart library. National scientific research administrations have also initiated many
research projects on smart library, in order to provide guidance to scholars. Untill now, there are
increasing researches on smart library in academic community, enterprises become more willing
to participate in the development of products, thus, greater achievements on smart library have
been made.
In practice, because the problems are lack of mature construction approaches, implementation
steps and technical solutions, the transformation of traditional libraries to smart version is still
in the exploratory stage, which makes the smart library like vivid talking in people’s minds. The
transformation and development of libraries is facing a number of problems and obstacles, which is
also urgent to study the theoretical issues in academic research, such as definition of the concepts,
criteria for construction, the ways of construction and implementation, the inter-library, regional
and library-enterprise cooperation, and the theoretical basis in it. In order to attract the attention
and reflections of colleagues and jointly promote the smart transformation and development of
librarianship in China, based on the literature review, this paper discusses the issues above, and
then proposes related solutions.

1 What is smart library

What exactly is a smart library? This is a question that every researcher, practitioner, developer
of technological products and user of smart library should understand. It is also the premise and
foundation for the sustainable research and practice of smart library, and the primary problem that
should be addressed during the construction and development of smart library.
After smart library was raised as new concept, relevant definitions and research have never
ceased. Domestic researchers understand and interpret the concept of smart library mainly from the
following four perspectives. First, it is defined by the form: one opinion states that the smart library
is a comprehensive ecosystem (J. L. CHU & DUAN, 2019), which is an advanced library form that
provides users with smart services and management through intelligent perception technologies
such as the Internet of Things (HAN, 2012). Digital library and mobile library actually builds