As the new academic year approaches, Peking University appointed me as the new director of the Library. I am willing to continue the "message from the library director" to communicate with every one of you.
My deep feelings of the library, long experience and in-depth thinking help me form a basic concept of the library business, that is, "user-oriented service first." This idea will guide me in my future business management and research work as the director of Peking University Library.
I am very grateful that you are a real user of Peking University Library, not just a "reader". In recent years, the library serves more than 2 million visitors per year, with more than 6,000 visitors per day; more than 1.8 million users visited the library website, with more than 5,000 users per day. You may visit the library in person or through the website for various purposes, perhaps for borrowing or returning books, reading books or periodicals, searching for electronic resources, accessing audio or video resources, attending information literacy lectures, or consulting the librarians. For whatever purposes, perhaps you can generate feelings that cannot get from other places.
If you only occasionally use the library resources or services, you are still an honorable real user, but you may not have received enough help from us. Your advice or suggestion is of great help to our service innovation.
If you frequently use the library resources or services, you are an active user. You must have benefited much from the library for your study, research or spiritual experience, but you may also encounter some unhappy things in the library. Your advice or suggestion is of great help to our improvement.
If you have used the library resources or services for many years, you become a loyal user of the library. I believe you have achieved success in learning, researching or teaching with our help, and have felt the library is a warehouse of data, a treasure of books, an ocean of the knowledge, a palace of wisdom, a station of time and space, a cultural hub, and a life class. Therefore, it is your information home, spiritual home and cultural home. Your advice and suggestion will be of great help to the development of our librarianship.
I am really hopeful that more potential users will soon become real users. Peking University has more than 20,000 faculty and staff, and more than 40,000 full-time students. It is our responsibility that every one of them could benefit from the help of the library. The library will take the initiative to contact and serve every faculty, staff and student!
I am extremely thankful that I have been a loyal user of Peking University Library. Over the past 34 years, Peking University Library has been deeply integrated into the rapid development and the world-class construction of Peking University, and taken the lead to unite national university libraries to carry out the constructing and sharing resources and collaborative innovation of services under the leadership of past directors Zhuang Shoujing, Lin Beidian, Dai Longji and Zhu Qiang. Like other users, I was impressed by the greatest advantage I have got from the library. When I was a student, I experienced the power of the library, just like "Past and present commingle: Eternity in the single blink of an eye!" by Luji over 1,7oo years ago, and "the thought may connect with ancient and modern, and the vision may cross the world" by Liu Xie over 1,500 years ago. During my teaching, I deeply experience that it is impossible to collect all the books on our own so we should frequently turn to the library to access the digital resources, and turn to reference librarians for the professional services no matter how well our information literacy is. In the new post, I sincerely welcome more valuable advice and suggestions from every one of you!
In the approaching new academic year, we will renovate the east building of the library and relocate the ancient books library, and we apologize for any inconvenience that this may cause to you. I appreciate your understanding and support. When welcoming the 19th Party Congress, and celebrating the 120th anniversary of Peking University, we will follow the requirements of General Secretary Xi Jinping that "to provide accessible, affordable and usable information services", combining with the anniversary theme "integrity and creativity, leading us to the future". We will cherish the advanced practices and successful experience that we have, put our heads together, and move forward to become the professional helper for all the users! become the remarkable expert in information literacy cultivation!
Chen Jianlong
Director
office@lib.pku.edu.cn