Brief Communication
China Academic Library and Information
System: Current Situation and Future
Development
QIANG ZHU*AB ST R A C T
The paper describes the background of the establishment of CALIS, explains its goals, structure, functions, and achievements during the past 3 years, and indicates its future development.
r 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
A BRIE FIN T RODUC TION TOCALIS
The China Academic Library and Information System1(abbreviated as CALIS), which was started in 1998, is a nation-wide resource-sharing sys-tem among Chinese academic libraries. As one of the sub-projects of Pro-ject 2112, its mission is to serve directly those universities which are funded by the central government in the project, by providing document and in-formation services to the users through the China Education and Research Network (CERNET3). In the meantime, CALIS also serves users in other universities and colleges so long as they have network connections to the China Education & Research Network (abbreviated as CERNET). Thus, CALIS and CERNETare known as ‘‘Two Public Service Systems’’.
*Center for CALIS, Room 621, Peking University Library, Beijing 100871, China. E-mail: [email protected]
1
Web site URL: http://www.calis.edu.cn
2
Project 211is a national project of higher education launched by the State Education Commission. ‘‘211’’ means by the end of the ¢rst decade of 21st century, with the extra fund invested by the central and local government, 100 universities in China will be promoted to the world level in terms of their research ability and graduates’quality.
3
Web site URL: http://www.cernet.edu.cn
The conception of CALIS is based on the fact that no single library can collect all the information materials published in the world, and no single library can serve all the needs required by users. Since China is still a devel-oping country, there is not enough money to enhance all the libraries, so it would be more e⁄cient and more cost-e¡ective to invest in a resource-sharing framework than to establish independent systems in each library.
However, such a system should not be independent from those libraries; rather, it has to rely on their human resources, documentation and infor-mation collections, and inforinfor-mation technology facilities. So a concept of ‘‘cooperative construction, open access and common use’’ was proposed, to attract all the libraries to make their own contribution. As a matter of fact, CALIS is just like a nation-wide academic library consortium in China, half supported by the government, half by the libraries themselves.
Goals of CALIS
For the short term: By the end of the year 2000, CALIS hopes to establish its framework. Thereafter, CALIS will ful¢ll a strategic goal, viz., to build CALIS into a national information infrastructure along with CERNET. Tasks for the ¢rst stage
In consideration of the budget and time limitations, the priority of CALIS was to reveal what exists in academic libraries and to increase utilization of the existing paper-based materials; therefore two main tasks were in order: (1) to build an information service network that contains hardware and software; (2) to introduce and produce various databases.
Organizational structure
* At the top is a committee that consists of o⁄cers from related depart-ments of the Ministry of Education and two university presidents from Beida and Tsinghua; an expert team acts as consultants to the committee;
* Under the leadership of the committee is the administrative center that takes charge of decision-making and coordination; the center is located at Peking University;
* Four national information centers, divided as Science, Social Science and Humanities Information Center, Engineering and Technology Information Center, Medical Information Center, and Agricultural Information Center; they have to provide the ¢nal support for infor-mation users;
* Seven regional information centers divided as East China South gional Center, East China North Regional Center, South China Re-gional Center, Central China ReRe-gional Center, Southwest China Regional Center, Northwest China Regional Center, and Northeast China Regional Center, which must provide secondary support for the information users; and,
* All member libraries have to provide basic support for their users.
Investment
The central government invested 60 million RMB for the project. Each provincial government that has a Regional Center provided at least the same amount of money, and each university provided at least the same amount of money to the national center, matching the central government’s investment.
TH EAC HIEV EM E N TS OFC ALIS
Within less than 3 years, CALIS has achieved quite a lot. On July18, 2001, it passed the evaluation and acceptance organized by the government. Both government o⁄cials and experts were satis¢ed with the evaluation.
(1) A three-level resource and service infrastructure has been established, and cooperative activities were taken in various cities and regions. Currently, the six functions of CALIS drafted in the plan have been ful¢lled, which include: Coordinative Acquisition, Online Catalo-guing, OPAC, ILL, Document Delivery, and Internet Navigating. (2) A number of foreign abstract and full-text databases were introduced,
in the ways of either central-funded acquisition or consortium acquisi-tion, covering almost all the disciplines and subjects, like the following:
Science Citation Index (SCI)
Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) Engineering Information (EI) Biological Abstracts (BA) Chemical Abstracts (CA) INSPEC (SA)
ProQuest Digital Dissertations (PQDD) Cambridge Scienti¢c Abstracts (CSA) UnCover
FirstSearch (OCLC) ABI/Global
Academic Search Elite Business Source Premier
Applied Science & Technology Plus (ASTP) Science Online
Elsevier ScienceDirect Onsite Academic Press
Kluwer Academic
IEEE/IEE Electronic Library (IEL) Genome Database
China InfoBank.
(3) A series of databases was produced, including:
* Union Catalogues of Books and Journals: 150 members have con-tributed 1.4 million titles and more than 3 million holdings;
* Current Contents of Chinese Journals: 28 members have contribu-ted more than 2 million abstracts of 5500 Chinese journals;
* Chinese Dissertation and Proceedings Abstract Databases: 85 mem-bers have contributed more than 70,000 abstracts;
* Chinese Databases with Unique Features: 23 members have contrib-uted 25 databases which contain more than 450,000 records; * Navigating Databases for Key Subjects: 45 members have
contribu-ted more than 290 disciplines.
(4) Developed an application platform operated on networks, which are Unicode, Z39.50, ISO10160, and 10161 compliant. The platform includes:
* Online cataloguing server and client, through which librarians can download and upload MARC records and holdings;
* Data-making tools and database servers for TOC and other self-made databases;
* Web-based search engines for accessing self produced databases; * Software for ILL and desktop document delivery services.
(5) CALIS has accomplished some bene¢ts to member libraries and their users:
* Better met the users’ needs: The rate increased from less than 50% to near 80%;
* Increased the availability of document and information resources: Users can access databases 24 hours a day,7 days a week;
* Improved the users’ information literacy: After training and practicing, users learned how to search and ¢nd what they want in databases; * Enhanced the collaboration between Chinese libraries and overseas
resource-sharing with foreign partners in various countries or regions;
* Established a highly capable sta¡: Some newcomers with advanced degrees have been hired; many employees have been trained to meet the needs of ITapplication and service transformation.
FU T U R EDEV ELOP M E N T OFCALIS
Currently, higher education in China is facing some innovations and chal-lenges, such as management reform, expansion of student enrollment, development of distance learning, etc. These changes have a¡ected the li-braries, and have caused imbalances for them in meeting users’ needs. Therefore, a strong demand for CALIS is to continue its construction and to play a more important role in supporting higher education and research. Integral development and resource-sharing have become common sense for librarians. More and more academic libraries want to participate in CALIS, which must do more to meet these needs.Thus, CALIS has drafted a blueprint for its Phase 2 development, which will last from 2001 to 2005. The priority of Phase 2 is to establish a digital library system for higher education and research, and four goals of the project within the next 5 years have been established:
(1) Expanding the scope of users, improving service quality. CALIS will make e¡orts to attract or encourage more libraries to become members, so that more users can access its resources and services; mean-while, CALIS will improve the speed and reliability of servers.
(2) Marketing the mechanism of system operation.To ensure sus-tainable development, we believe that beside government support, CALIS has to be self-supported, which means it should get some money back from providing document and information services. So the system has to be pre-pared for marketing.
(3) Establishing an education-oriented information resource service. Distance learning and network education are booming; therefore, CALIS should make itself ready to support big changes Q more and more users will request ‘‘one stop’’ service, which means users can ¢nd and down-load whatever they want directly through the network.
(4) Setting up a dozen of digital library test-beds. In concentrat-ing on digital libraries, we still encounter many problems and issues, and not all the libraries can solve them. To avoid duplications at low levels, we will choose some libraries that have better conditions to do research and make experiments, especially in developing application software, drafting standards, creating digital resources, and exploring service patterns.
To ful¢ll these goals, the following tasks have to be achieved:
* Continue to introduce commercial databases for users. Evaluations will be made of those existing databases; adjustments will be made accordingly. The priority for new products is full-text databases; the purchase method is still to form a consortium. Document delivery should be strengthened.
* Create large numbers of digital resources. Several objects have been chosen: Full-text dissertations and thesis; e-reserves; Ancient Chinese rare books and other collections; selected old Chinese journal articles. * Set up back-up data centers. With digital resources increasing, it be-comes more and more important to archive, store, and preserve data permanently, in case any disaster happens. Two or three such data centers will be built in di¡erent cities.
* Develop new application software. While continuing to improve and upgrade the current application system, we will develop a new gen-eration of the system which can support digital library construction and service.Various APIs and tools for interoperation between di¡er-ent systems are also anticipated.
* Set up training centers. To take full advantage of CALIS, training li-brary sta¡ and users is a key task. Dozens of multimedia training cen-ters will be set up to deliver courses and instructions to faculty and students as well as librarians, and to improve their information lit-eracy and operation skills.
* Establish provincial service centers. In order to expand CALIS’s ser-vices, some provinces or autonomous regions, which have unique con-ditions, will be chosen to set up service centers. The centers will be in academic libraries. The investment will come from both the central government and local governments.
CONC LUSION
Based on the experience of the last 3 years, with support from the government as well as universities and colleges, CALIS will achieve more during Phase 2 of the project, provide better services to the users, and give stronger support to higher education in China. It is believed that further cooperation will occur between CALIS and domestic or foreign library and information systems. In this ¢eld, people in di¡erent countries should learn from each other and help each other. We welcome partners and collaborators from any place and with any means.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dai Longji, Chen Ling & Zhang Hongyang (2000) CALIS Q An academic library consortia in China’’. InformationTechnologyand Libraries 19(2), 66^70.
Qiang Zhu (1998) CALIS Q A resource sharing project in network environment for academic li-braries. Proceedings of International Conference on New Missions for Academic Libraries in the 21st Century. Beijing: Peking University Press, pp. 258^262.
Qiang Zhu (1996) Several issues on the development of Chinese academic library and information system. Journal of Academic Libraries 14(1),1^5 (in Chinese).
