Page 52 - Journal of Library Science in China 2020 Vol.46

LI Jingxia & LI Zhenwu / Inquiring into and reflecting on library professionalism in the new era: 051
Taking Wuhan public libraries’ anti-pandemic practice as an example

spiritual core of the library’s professionalism in the new era and makes preliminary suggestions
for the construction of professionalism during the 14th Five-Year Plan period and even in the long
run.

1 Q: What is the connotation of the library’s professionalism in the new era?

1.1 Literature review

The professionalism is the basis of the librarianship and the occupation. The professional
foundation of the Chinese librarianship is relative weak and the professional qualification system
is lacking. Therefore, the professionalism has been the focus of attention of the library academia,
industry and education circle.
At present, discussions about library’s professionalism are centered on three keywords,
namely deprofessionalization, competitiveness and institutionalization. Firstly, discussion about
deprofessionalization emphasizes “finding problems”, which reveals the professional crisis
that practitioners are facing under the financial stress, technology shocks, fragmented reading
and outsourcing trend. It warns that “it is harmful for the development of the library to exclude
the professional backgrounds in the library and information science and to deprofessionalize
librarians” (C. F. CHEN, Y. D. WANG, SHENG, & DING, 2011). Secondly, research on
competitiveness emphasizes “analyzing problems”, which takes the professional skills and core
competitiveness of librarians/libraries as the starting point and analyzes the deprofessionalization
phenomenon (ZHAO, 2010). In line with it, researches consider “the acquisition of new
professional skills” and “enhancing core competitiveness” as solutions to deprofessionalization
(X. M. XIAO, 2007), and make suggestions on strengthening professionalism. Lastly, works on
institutionalization emphasize “solving problems”, which is regarded as the main way to deal
with the “deprofessionalization” trend. Institutions in three aspects are involved. The first one is
the librarian qualification system (WU, 2004; S. W. WANG, 2003), which was once the hotspot,
but has not been implemented. As The Public Library Law of the People’s Republic of China was
enacted, it becomes even more impossible to implement the librarian qualification system in a
short period (J. S. LIU & LI, 2013). The second one is the professional librarian system which is
more operable. If the librarian qualification system is considered as the institution at the industry
level, the professional librarian system including subject librarians (CHU & D. R. ZHANG,
2008), data librarians (ZENG, 2017), digital humanities librarians (ZHU & YANG, 2019) and
reading promotion librarians (YAN, 2015) can be categorized as the library’s internal institution.
The library community finds a discourse paradigm and action model to grapple with reforms by
refining the concept of “X librarians” continuously. However, the “X librarians” usually originate
from a certain trend and are related with academic libraries that underline scientific research. It
is still uncertain whether the concept can enhance the competitiveness of the library and improve