The new Qingpu Library was
opened to the public officially on August 28 when the District's 1st
Citizen Reading Festival was unveiled. Completed in July this year,
this new modern district-level public library is located in the
Puyang Pavilion on the Xiayang Lake of the New City. Overlooked in
the distance, it seems that two wave lines are stretching from the
bank to the center of the lake. As the first water library of its
kind in China, it is a significant part of Qingpu District's
cultural facilities construction. The new library, together with the
Qingpu Museum, becomes the landmark architecture and public cultural
base of the New City.
Covering a floor area of 8,000 square meters, the new library
boasts six reading rooms, one reporting hall and one training
classroom, with a collection of more than 330,000 books and over 800
categories of newspapers and magazines. Thanks to the comprehensive
modern facilities and advanced information service methods, the new
library provides such additional functions as electronic reading,
movies, second and third document compilation, education and
training apart from the traditional book lending service. Following
the perfection of hardware facilities, the inner software of the new
library has also been improved on a continuous basis. Some valuable
books and documents, like the Complete Library in Four Branches of
Literature, the Complete Translation of the Twenty-Four Histories,
the Complete Prose of the Song Dynasty, the Encyclopedia of China,
the Pictorial of Dian Shi Zhai, the photocopied Shen Bao Newspaper
and Young Companion, were added successively into the library's
collection, rendering it even greater value together with the
originally boasted special collection of the "Qingpu Local
Documents" and the "Wu Yue Culture Characteristic Documents".
The Qingpu Library has also jointed in the Shanghai Library and
participated in the "All-purpose Card" circulation, realizing the
interconnection of book lending in Shanghai. The FBRSM (Free Borrow
and Return Service Model) with the Shanghai Library and its branches
in other districts and counties enriched resources of the new
library. Based on Shanghai Library's online resources, readers can
not only search information about the collections of the library and
its branches or the lending information of specific collection, but
also can directly access to the library's various database resources
and documents.
Moreover, the new library exerts great efforts in strengthening
the construction of networked and digitalized document resources. It
has established the branch centers of the "Project of National
Cultural Information Resource Sharing" and purchased more than
20,000 "Superstar" E-Books and the use rights of the "Dragonsource
E-Magazine", the "China InfoBank Online Database" and the "China
Journal Network Full-text Database" in succession, all available to
readers on the new library's computers. With intensified digital
library services, the District's China TeleCom broadband users are
now able to read for free 20,000 electronic books at home after
logging on the new library's website once downloading and installing
the reading software.
The Qingpu Library engaged an expert advisory group of 12 famous
experts and scholars in Shanghai to hold "Qingxi Forum" in the
library from time to time.
The new library adopts a series of measures for serving its
readers. The ground-floor hall and the literature lending room are
equipped with two automatic book borrowing-returning machines, and
readers can borrow and return books by themselves. Community book
returning boxes are placed at the gates of all communities of the
city area and opened at a fixed time on a daily basis. Thus, readers
can conveniently return books. Telephone and online renewal is also
available. For physically inconvenient seniors and disabled readers,
books will be sent to their homes.
It is learnt that since its trial operation as of July 12, the
new library has attracted a lot of readers, and the surging card
application surpassed original estimation. So far, the library has
received around 50,000 persons, registered more than 3,000 new
reader's cards, with over 1,000 readers a day in average.