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In Chinese, “reading promotion” is “阅读推广” and “public library” is “公共图书馆.” A subject search with these two words was conducted in the CNKI (China National Knowledge Infrastructure, the largest academic article database in China). The first article was published in 2006. Since 2012, more than 100 articles were published each year, and in 2016, the number of publications increased to 442. This indicates that scholars in the LIS field are paying more attention to reading promotion in public libraries.
Figure 1.
Publications on reading promotion in public libraries, 2006-2017
Chinese scholar’s research on reading promotion in public libraries focuses on three aspects. The first is about a specific library’s reading promotion practice, such as Liaoning Province Library (Meng, 2013), Hubei Province Library (Li, 2014), Suzhou Library (Xu, Jin, & Zhang, 2014), and Ningbo Library (Liu & Hong, 2017). Another focus is to investigate the reading promotion practice of public libraries in special areas, such as the Pearl River Delta region (Dai, 2017), Shanxi Province (Li, 2016), Hefei area in Anhui Province (Cheng, 2017), Guangzhou area (Li, 2014), and Dongguan area (Wen, 2017). Besides the focuses mentioned above, there is also research on special kinds of reading promotion, such as survey of story time of picture books in public libraries (Feng li, 2017), exploration on reading salons (Fu, 2014), investigation of reading journal of public libraries (Li, 2014), and book recommendations of public libraries on the web (Xu, 2014). There is also an English paper on reading promotion in public libraries in China, and it is mainly about book recommendations and reading interest of Chinese public library users (Sun & Xie, 2016). All these researches give the study information, data and ideas to further investigate the current state, characteristics and trends of reading promotion in Chinese public libraries as a whole.