Page 25 - Journal of Library Science in China, Vol.47, 2021

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024 Journal of Library Science in China, Vol.13, 2021

and early Qing Dynasty advocated the exchange of books for transcription and wrote the book
Ancient Book Circulation. After the 17th century, systematic and modern idea of collection and
utilization was born, which had two major contributions. The first one was the idea of making the
collection available for the public, such as the idea of HUANG Yuji in the Qing Dynasty. The other
one was “the collection of Confucian classics”. ZHOU Yongnian of the Qing Dynasty proposed
to collect Confucian classics for poor scholars, which furthered CAO Xuequan’s proposal of
making private collection of Confucian classics available for the public (at the end of the Ming
Dynasty). ZHOU’s proposal set up the idea of public collection for public use and cultivating
talents. CHENG Huanwen believed that library science in ancient China was consummate after the
Song Dynasty and at the end of the Ming Dynasty and the beginning of the Qing Dynasty. “Library
science in ancient China not only guided the development of ancient Chinese book collection, but
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also ranked in the forefront of the development of library science in the world for a long time” .
The idea of collection and utilization in modern library science inherited and developed
the ancient one, and furthered the theory of contradictions by applying contradictory thinking
and correlative thinking, transforming their reconcilable contradictory cycle of collection and
utilization to common relationship between them. Under the guidance of this idea, two major
research fields arose: collection construction and user service. Collection construction developed
into fields such as collection policy, collection evaluation, material acquisition, information
organization and information resource management; and user service developed into fields such as
categories of users, user psychology, information service, knowledge service, information retrieval
and information literacy education.
The theory of essential elements as well as the theory of collection and utilization are the
two major theories put forward by Chinese, which summed up representation in practice as
phenomenon and thus achieved the progress from perceptual knowledge to rational knowledge.
Based on the two theories, applied library science was founded by the first generation of modern
librarians represented by DU Dingyou and LIU Guojun. Built on the results of the first generation
of modern librarians, the second and the third generation employed modern scientific thinking
and methods to study library practice and also utilized abstract thinking to bring about scientific
theories, which enriched and perfected the ideological system of applied library science.

1.2 Abstraction of objects: refinement of concrete things and phenomena by library
science

Abstraction of practice can deal with phenomena and recognize things, but can hardly solve the
problem of essence. According to Engels, “our subjective thinking and the objective world are
subject to the same law, so the two cannot contradict each other, and must be consistent with each
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other.” Chinese library science originated from objective library practice which was based on
objects. Whichever viewpoint in library science research cannot and should not alienate from the