Home
Letters to Editor
Domestic
World
Business & Trade
Culture & Science
Travel
Society
Government
Opinions
Policy Making in Depth
People
Investment
Life
Books/Reviews
News of This Week
Learning Chinese
Bookworms to Get More Reading Rooms

The National Library of China (NLC) is running out of room, so it plans to add another building to house more books and facilitate its digital reading service.

The library, the world's largest hub for Chinese-language information, has a responsibility to expand since few Chinese literary resources are online, Vice-Minister of Culture Zhou Heping said Tuesday at a symposium to assess the feasibility of the construction project in Beijing.

The NLC aims to become the country's national headquarters for fledgling digital libraries. It also plans to increase its storage space.

The government has put the NLC in charge of designing China's digital library project. NLC's expansion project, therefore, will be a big step forward, said Zhang Yanbo, NLC's vice-director.

The NLC began its digital library research in 1995. So far, the NLC has digitalized nearly 200,000 books in text, audio-visual and image forms, Zhang said.

The national library had collected 23.1 million books by the end of last year, greatly surpassing its maximum storage capacity of 20 million, Zhou said.

Asia's largest book warehouse was designed for use by 6,000 readers a day. But the library received at least 12,000 readers a day on average last year, Zhang said.

The expansion project will provide the library with enough storage space to last 30 years, Zhou said.

Sources on the symposium said the area of the new structure will be 70,000 square metres. The area of the current NLC building is 170,000 square metres.

(eastday.com April 3, 2002)

Sino-US Digital Library under Construction in Zhejiang University
Experts Study National Library Extension Project
Free Festival "Feast" for Bookworms in China
National Library Plans Activities for the Holidays
National Library Embarks on US$129 Million Expansion Project
National Library Organizes Readers' Month Program
National Library Promotes Popular Science
New Library Targets Ordinary Citizens
National Library to Organize Activities for Readers
China to Promote Online Library
National Library of China
Copyright © China Internet Information Center. All Rights Reserved
E-mail: webmaster@china.org.cn Tel: 86-10-68996214/15/16