The China Society for Library Science's Sixth Session and the Academic Annual Meeting 2001 were held from 23 to 28 September, in Chengdu, Sichuan Province. 

China Society for Library Science held its sixth session from 23-25 September, attended by nearly 300 delegates from the library societies and affiliated units all over China. Mr. Zhou Heping, the Vice-Minister of Culture Department and the other officials presented at the opening ceremony. The session elected the 6th Board of Directors of 126 members, the Board Chairman, Mr. Zhou Heping, and the Secretary General, Tang Gengsheng, who is the former Assistant Secretary General of China Society of Library Science. 

From 26th to 28th September, more than 500 delegates all over Chinese library circles, including a 20-member American Chinese Librarian Associate Delegation, attended the Academic Annual Meeting 2001 of China Society for Library Science. 

The theme of the Academic Annual Meeting is: the sustainable development strategy of library in the 21st century. The sub-themes are 

A. the role library plays in the development of China's west

B. the exchange and share of library resource

C. the research, development and establishment of digital library

D. the important role library information and documentation work play in the scientific and technological revolution and law-made decision

E. the management and reform of library

F. the research of library in the new era.

Hot Topics

Wu Jianzhong, the member of the Governing Board of IFLA and the Deputy Director of Shanghai Library, gave the session an important speech, entitled the Ten Hot Points of the Development of Chinese Libraries. The ten points are: 

A. the existence value of library

B. the re-engineering of libraries

C. WTO and libraries

D. the argument about charge gratis or not

E. the virtual service

F. the digital library and the description of the resource

G. library federations 

H. the professionality of the librarian

I. about the library law

J. the reform and future trends of IFLA

The traditional library isn't abandoned or neglected companying the non-paper era’s coming, since the new system and carrier supplement the old ones in storing and transferring information, but not taking place. The new task of librarians in the revolutionary era is to organize the disordered network space to an orderly digital library through network resource cataloging. The facts will confirm that the network makes librarians more professional and indispensable. 

Chinese library will face a new challenge after China’s joining WTO, who in turn will take China in the systematic circle of economic globalization step by step. The latest trend of WTO shows that it has directly or indirectly influenced on the traditional operation and future development of library service. The new circle of trade negotiation frame requests that the public service fields, including library, will be open to the foreign challengers who have heavy reason to enjoy the so-called National Treatment so long as the service is joined by the non-public capital or enterprise. 

VRD (Virtual Reference Desk) is a service system providing dialogue-formed intelligent service, which has quickly developed and succeeded in Europe and American countries. The Network Colligated Navigation opened by Shanghai Information Resources Network has answered all kinds of questions of the reading public and established a question database highly praised by readers after 4 months rich experience. 

As to the resource description, the future tendency is that all kinds of authoritative meta-data can exist at one platform according to certain rules, going on efficient content rearrangement and information excavation in line with the formats and characteristics. All kinds of Chinese meta-data formats should strengthen their inner links to be more cooperatable on the network. 

International cooperation and government supply will play more and more important role in the development of library federation. China should strengthen the cooperation of library institutions and associations, for that basic equipment and technique of information are indispensable, except efficient administration. 

Digital Library

During the annual meeting period, five groups were organized to go on academic exchanges concerning the main theme and the sub-themes. 

The research and development of the digital library is the main topic of the 3rd group, and the group members take great active part in the discussion. Some think that Dublin Core is on the more advantageous position than the widespread used MARC, although whose important role at nowadays has been absolutely admitted. Some insist that MARC still is the powerful tool of establishing the digital library, since it has been widely used in library circles and accumulated rich experience, though Dublin Core, developed aiming to the problem of over widespread hits of web browsers, does stepped forward largely compared to the web browser, which is used for the non-librarians who know little about library cataloguing and indexing, especially for those writers to do primary cataloguing and indexing when updating their works. Library completely needn't give up MARC by Dublin Core, instead new functions should be developed to be more close to the readers requests of content search. Some experts point out that the MARC format is too complex to be mastered by common writers. The holders of this opinion think the several essential fields are enough to meet the need of the simplified record, and the complexity is not necessity of the MARC format. Others think that both of the former two ideas have limits that a new format of expandable language should be developed. 

The delegate of UniHan Digital Technology Co., Ltd introduced that they had transformed 8 hundred million Chinese characters of ancient books. They use the technique of OCR, Xml, Dublin Core, SOAP(Simple Object Access Protocol), COBA, SD/SB(Simple Data/Simple Base) to deal with the library holdings of numbers of library members as a virtual library. The digitalization of the document resource adopts that: structuralization---meta-data collecting--- meta-data  processing---transforming---point prompting. After the electronic cataloger scans the relative items, the computer will transform the MARC to Dublin Core automatically. The delegate also introduced the process and procedures of the standardization of Chinese characters and the multi-language handling. 
 

Conclusion

The successful session is the first grand meeting of librarians all over China in the new Millennium. With the development of scientific techniques, the libraries will straighten co-operations so as to adapt to the new international and domestic situation, providing more efficient service to the readers and clients. Chinese libraries also will pay much more attention to the development of digital library to realize the resource sharing on the Internet. 

This annual meeting has received 720 papers, among which 56 excellences were chosen to concentrate a published book the Sustainable Development Strategy of Library in the 21st Century.