Page 10 - Journal of Library Science in China, Vol.47, 2021

RAO Quan / National smart library system: opening a new chapter for the transformation toward smart libraries 009

on. The library community has accumulated rich experience in software and hardware system
development, digital resource co-construction and sharing, standard and specification system
construction, digital service promotion and so on, and has realized the transformation from
traditional libraries to digital libraries.
For example, in public libraries, nowadays the full coverage of wireless network has been
achieved in most libraries at the provincial and municipal level; 24-hour self-service is provided in
major municipal libraries; people can borrow books at any time, access books and attend lectures
held by libraries through cable TV, and read e-books provided by libraries by scanning QR code
in the subway. By the end of 2019, the number of computer terminals available for digital reading
[15]
in public libraries above the county level in China had reached 145, 700 , the total collection of
electronic books nearly 866 million [16]5 , and the number of website visits 2, 118 million pages [16]6 .
In order to adapt to the new trend of the development of mobile Internet, libraries at all levels
actively explore mobile services. Up to now, the mobile reading platform of the National Digital
Library has set up nearly 400 local branches across the country. More and more libraries have taken
the initiative to push library resources and services to users’ mobile terminals by using new media
service channels such as the official Weibo homepage, Wechat platform, mobile phone portals and
mobile apps, which has greatly expanded the cultural influence of the library in the cyberspace.
On April 23 2020, the World Book and Copyinght Day, the NLC united with nearly 100 libraries
to initiate the publicity through the channel of TikTok, which introduced library collections by a
combination of short videos and topics and invited users to tell their reading stories and share their
experience in learning. A total of 167, 000 videos were released and viewed almost 2 billion times.
Today, the development of information technology has entered a new stage. The level of
intelligence in technology application continues to increase, and the huge energy contained in
data resources is continuously released. The role of information technology is transforming from
boosting economic development as an auxiliary tool to leading economic development as a core
engine, and thus the smart transformation of the library is imminent.
(1) The resource processing, organization and service methods of the library need to adapt to
the new changes. On the one hand, as the Internet further extends to IoT, the real-time status of
more and more physical entities is widely collected, transmitted and aggregated, which becomes
an important data basis for the government’s decision-making, scientific research, enterprise
development and even personal learning and growth. At the same time, information of all kinds of
physical carriers collected by the library also need to be linked with each other, with users, with
physical resources of other libraries, and even with other intelligent facilities and equipment. On
the other hand, as resources accumulated in human information activities increase exponentially,
structured and unstructured online data coexists and is exchanged, shared, and gathered on a large
scale through the network. All sectors of the socio-economic development put forward higher
requirements for data mining and intelligent analysis of big data based on granular knowledge
linkage. The transmission rate of the next generation information network is increasing, and higher