Page 27 - Journal of Library Science in China 2020 Vol.46

026 Journal of Library Science in China, Vol.12, 2020

practical capabilities of librarians in smart services, but also creating favorable conditions for
timely and effective communication between readers and librarians.
Third, the smartness of the environment. At present, most libraries are still in the stage of
digital transformation. To become smart libraries, they must be enabled by smart environments.
The environment here includes not only the hard environment of technology and facilities, such
as the application of advanced technologies, e.g., the Internet of Things, RFID, robots, artificial
intelligence, the full coverage of WiFi, and the use of various sensing and specific application
systems; but also the soft environment of people-friendly management system, relevant standards,
policies and regulations of the library. In order to achieve such environments academia and the
library community must integrate experts and scholars in various fields to study and formulate
clear evaluation standards and a complete a set of quantitative appraisal systems. The library
community must also be able to establish management systems, standards for personnel, facilities
and technologies that meet the needs of the library. Whether these systems and standards are
compatible with the smart transformation of the library will directly affect the construction and
sustainable development of the smart library. In addition, the smart library does not stand alone.
It is closely related to smart campus and smart city. Finally, government policies supporting smart
development will help promote the construction and development of smart library.
Fourth, innovative team building. The smart library needs intensive and smart management,
which requires innovative management units. Therefore, managers of the library shall integrate
business departments, reduce redundant departments, and strengthen cooperation among them.
The smart library needs a team of smart librarians with a high degree of collaboration skills. “Only
librarians with certain disciplinary background and professional training in library and information,
are able to provide users with personalized, professional, and knowledge intensive services, and
increase users’ smart capabilities can be called smart librarians” (C. M. XU & L. F. CHEN, 2014).
Therefore, librarians shall continue to learn and improve, grasp advanced technologies such
as automation and data mining, and improve their information literacy, data literacy, technical
literacy and smart service capabilities. The director of the library shall create awareness of smart
development, focus on the recruitment of professional talents in other disciplines except LIS,
develop a sound assessment system for smart librarians, optimize the arrangement of posts in the
library, balance the disciplinary background and expertise among the librarians, and engage more
young talents in the construction of smart library.

3 How to build smart library

The vision of smart library reflects the expectation of most library users, and also the pursuit of
library workers led by their director. However, due to the lack of clear development criteria, there
are still many unsolved questions and problems in the construction of the smart library. Goals,
content, processes and effectiveness are still vague.