Page 33 - Journal of Library Science in China, Vol.47, 2021

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librarianship and the framework of basic elements—“books, library and people”. The librarianship
as a system is divided to national library, provincial library, city and county library vertically, and
public library, academic library, professional library horizontally. The historical experience proves
that the book-centered value could help make scientific career development policies and plans, and
promote career development. The National Library Coordination Plan (1957) and the Outline of
Library Work Report (1980) adopted respectively by the State Council and the Secretariat of the
Communist Party of China Central Committee were strong evidence. This value is not only related
to library standardization, evaluation, and professional ethics but also to library science education
and research. The “de-documentization” and “de-librarization” in library science education in the
1990s were profound lessons. In recent years, it has gradually become the consensus of scholars
that library science education and discipline construction should shift its foundation back to books,
the library and librarianship.
Both micro library science and macro library science have a common core value—book
centered. It neither denies the user-centered status of modern library science nor ignores the
importance of librarians. Nevertheless, it emphasizes the functions of users and librarians. In the
pre-Qin period, China had established a national system of official historians in charge of ancient
books. Ancient library administrators had high academic literacy and status. At the beginning of
21st century, the discussion on “library spirit” and “library rights” made great achievements, which
were the contribution of the third generation librarians. Today, in the professional library research,
we should not only pay attention to librarians’ information literacy but also librarians’ academic
literacy; and not only the professional spirit of putting users first and dedication to service but also
that of sticking to original duties.
In particular, it should be pointed out that the book-centered idea in this study does not
exclude a series of new concepts of resources such as documental information, information and
information resource in library science, but instead emphasizes that all these modern concepts are
derived from books and cannot be divorced from the basic concept of “books”. With the constant
change of library books or resources, the phenomenon of substituting books with “information”/
“information resource” or combining books and information with “documental information” will
confuse or blur basic concepts, and lead to the abandonment of the bedrock—books in the pursuit
of fashion or getting lost in the confusion of information. Therefore, the book-centered idea is not
only the foundation of all kinds of information resource but also the foundation of the library and
librarianship.

3 Value

The academic history of library science demonstrates that the ideological system of Chinese
library science is the outstanding contribution made by several generations of librarians to
the establishment of library science with Chinese characteristics, as well as the outstanding