China Impressed with ALA Conference Model

Participants in the 2011 Library Society of China conference in Guiyang. From left to right: Shuyong Jiang (University of Illinois), Barbara Ford (University of Illinois), Hong Cheng (UCLA), Paula Kaufman (University of Illinois), Haiying Qian (Missouri State Library), Hwa-wei Lee (project evaluator), Jing Liu (University of British Columbia), and Paul Qiu (Queens Library).

Print

A delegation of 10 library leaders from China, including the directors of several provincial libraries, a library educator, and a university library director, traveled to the United States in the summer of 2011 to observe the operations of several library associations, including the American Library Association, the Urban Libraries Council, and the Chinese American Librarians Association. The delegation, led by Mr. Yu Qun, director of the Bureau of Social Culture within the Chinese Ministry of Culture, and Mr. Yan Xiangdong, executive director of the Library Society of China (LSC), attended the 2011 ALA Annual Conference in New Orleans in hopes of seeing how a large-scale library conference was conducted. The ALA conference became the highlight of the delegation’s trip.

Based on the observations of the delegation members (most of whom are board directors of LSC), the society adopted several changes in its own annual conference, which took place October 25–28 in Guiyang, the capital of Guizhou province in Southwest China. LSC made changes in the opening ceremony, the special awards presentation, and the way the sessions were organized; it also expanded the number of exhibitors and sponsors. In addition to the general sessions, it added 17 concurrent sessions. Attendance rose significantly.

LSC invited a team of eight American library specialists to the conference in Guiyang. All were winding up their visits through the joint China–US Libraries Professional Exchange Project between the US Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and the Chinese Ministry of Culture. The team members and their Chinese colleagues presented a three-hour session on “Creation and Change: International Exchange and Library Development.” Paula Kaufman, university librarian and dean of libraries at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, spoke about the values and significance of the university’s participation in the China-US cooperation. Shuyong Jiang of UIUC’s International and Area Studies Library and project leader of the IMLS-funded “Think Globally, Act Globally” project spoke on “Merging Multiple Cultures and Achieving Win-Win Situations through Cooperation.” After the conference, the US team members conducted a one-day seminar for library directors in Guizhou before going on to the provinces of Hubei and Shanxi to conduct two three-day seminars for library directors there.

Founded in 1925 and headquartered at the National Library of China in Beijing, LSC is the national library organization of China. It has a presence in each of China’s 33 province divisions (made up of 22 provinces, four municipalities, five autonomous regions, and two special administrative regions) through a provincial or municipal library society, each of which is administratively connected to its respective provincial or municipal library. In China, all provincial libraries are under the administrative control of the Bureau of Culture in their respective areas.

In recent years, LSC has expanded its scope of activities, especially in the areas of scholarly communication, in-service training and certification of library workers (who may or may not have a formal library education or appropriate library degrees), international cooperation and exchange, publishing, the development of library laws and policies, and assisting and advising government agencies on matters related to library support and services.

LSC has eight divisions (concerned with special libraries, armed forces school libraries, party school libraries, labor union libraries, youth organization libraries, medical libraries, school libraries, and higher education libraries) and four special working committees (academic and research, translation and publishing, exchange and cooperation, and promotion of reading).

Since 1999, LSC has organized annual library conferences in various parts of China in collaboration with a provincial or regional library society.

HWA-WEI LEE, project evaluator of the China–US Library Collaboration Project, retired as chief of the Asian Division at the Library of Congress in 2008 and is dean emeritus of Ohio University Libraries in Athens.