Resource Sharing, China
An “International Seminar on Collection Development and Resource Sharing in Modern Libraries” was held in Xi’an, China, on 17–20 May 1992. About 49 Chinese specialists and 29 persons from other countries participated. Prof. Chen Yu was chair of the organizing committee.
Most of the presentations reported on Chinese matters, emphasizing local practice and planning for resource sharing. Speakers from Thailand and the Philippines also spoke about the resource sharing work of their own libraries. The basic approach to resource sharing appeared to be one of interlibrary loan of printed documents and making of photocopies. China faces a problem in its tradition of libraries operating independently of one another; in one paper it was noted that “libraries have little cooperation…and the resource sharing…is poorly organized, informal, and inefficient. There are very limited interlibrary loans and cooperative acquisition, and no union catalogues.”
There were a few papers given by librarians from Britain (D. J. Foskett), Germany (Paul Kaegbein), Australia (G. E. Gorman, M. Henty), and the United States. Rosary College was the only American institution with two representatives, Michael E. D. Koenig and Tze–Chung Li; both presented papers on technological aspects of resource sharing. Collection development, one of the subjects of the seminar, did not have as much attention as resource sharing, nor was it approached very specifically. The policy guidelines of the American Library Association, which have been guiding collection building in the United States for a decade, were not cited in the abstracts seen.
As a general observation by one who has only seen the abstracts, it seems unfortunate that the participants did not have the benefit of extended presentations about the most advanced Western systems of collection development (such as that of Stanford University) and resource sharing (such as those of the British Library, OCLC, and RLIN).
Abstracts of the papers have been published in English, by the Shanghai Scientific and Technical Publishers, 450 Rui–Jin Er Road, Shanghai 200020 (ISBN 7–5323–3000–1 / G).
© 1992 Rosary College