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August 16, 2006
China
A very large number of the hits on the site are coming from China
I understand that the Chinese Government are keen to develop their network of public libraries, which must be vast.
How important that any lessons that could be learned here should be of use to them.
Don't start an MLA!! That's one.
Posted by Perkins at August 16, 2006 12:00 PM
Comments
Here's an article from the People's Daily about plans to build libraries for 900 million (million!) rural Chinese:
As I'm off to the Beijing Book Fair next week and have a new Chinese representative who focuses on academic libraries, I'll do my best to make contact on your behalf, Tim, with people working to develop the public library system in China. If anyone in Beijing, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, or Shanghai reads this and would like to meet and talk about this when I'm there in a couple of weeks, please contact me: karen@berkshirepublishing.com. Here's a bit from the article:
"Although China is a nation of avid readers, with large crowds browsing almost every urban bookstore and a 100 million newspapers printed daily, China's rural residents have long had a dearth of reading material.
"That's expected to soon change as the country plans to fund 200,000 village libraries to bring more of the written word to the country's 900 million farmers, according to the State Press and Publication Administration of China."
Posted by: Karen Christensen at August 16, 2006 12:51 PM
Whoops, I forgot to paste in the link: http://english.people.com.cn/200607/26/eng20060726_286957.html
Posted by: Karen Christensen at August 16, 2006 2:04 PM