THE Chinese State Ministry of Culture convened a working conference on September 8 in Beijing to propel the implementation of the ‘China Digital Library Promotion Project’.

Chiefs of the Ministry of Culture and the National Library of China, Mr. YANG Zhijin and Mr ZHOU Heping, attended and addressed the meeting, a gathering of the country’s senior cultural officials at the provincial, municipal and regional levels, as well as directors from the provincial and city libraries all over the country.

The conference reiterated the importance of the ‘Digital Library Promotion Project’, which is initiated by the Ministry of Culture and Finance during the 12th ‘Five-year Plan’ as a major cultural welfare in succession to the ‘Cultural Sharing Project’ and the ‘Public E-Reading Room Construction project’, urging concentrated efforts to facilitate the implementation of the project through prudent overall planning and the close collaboration with the progress of the ‘Cultural Sharing Project’.

Centered by the National Digital Library of China (NDLC), the ‘Digital Library Promotion Project’ will build up a hierarchically distributed network throughout the country, with digital libraries at different levels as its nodes, allowing users of the country’s public libraries to access a wide range of digital library services via the internet, the mobile telecommunications and the CATV network, or through mobile devices such as cell phone, digital TV or mobile TV.

The Project is now undergoing its infrastructure stage and is scheduled to complete the hardware preparation and development of the working platform by 2012. A total of 15 provincial libraries and 52 municipal libraries have already been selected as pilots to conduct the project. By the end of the next year all the remaining provincial libraries and an additional 131 municipal libraries will be involved to connect with the NDLC, thus a nationwide digital library service network is expected to take shape. During the year 2013~2015 the project will be extended throughout the country to incorporate all digital library resources in China, while a set of guidelines will come into effect to standardize and improve the digital library services.  (2011-09-27)