General Description of the Fujian Provincial Library The Fujian Provincial Library (FPL) is located in downtown Fuzhou. It was originally connected to an institution for training officials in feudal China. They became a separate provincial library in 1911. They moved to a new building in 1995 from a much older building not too far away. They have 22,5000 sq. m of floor space, 900 seats, and space for 3.3 million volumes. Children's Services and some collections are still housed at the old building. The main departments at the new building are General Office, Security, Facilities, Personnel, Training, Technical Services, Reading, Lending, Serials, Special Collections, Foreign Literature, Reference, Automation, Micrographics, and Audio-visual. "The Library is open to the whole community. It not only provides reference and reading service, but also acts as the provincial centre in book collection, bibliography, inter-library cooperation, librarianship research and vocational training. It widely collects domestic and foreign publications on politics, economics, science, technology, culture, education, and other subjects. It has book exchange relations with over 1700 units at home and abroad. The library offers a wide variety of services for government agencies, organizations, army forces, scientific research institutions, industry and the general public. It also takes on the routine duties of the secretariat of Fujian Society of Library Science, compiles and distributes the Journal of Fujian Society of Library Science, Information Alert and briefing of Libraries in Fujian." "The Collection of the library was founded on the stock of Zhengyi and three other schools of classical learning. Successively, there were added the collections of tens of famous ancient book warehouses. So, it is rich in ancient books and local literature. The special collection (including ancient books and Fujian local literature) reaches 400,000 volumes. The thread-bound ancient books and rare books respectively amount to one-fourth and one-half of the total volumes in Fujian." "... The whole stock is now 2.5 million volumes, 30 times as much as it was when new China was founded. There are 11,000 Chinese periodicals and newspapers and 4,000 foreign serials. Among the 3,200 back titles published in the old China, quite a few of them are the only existing copies in China now." (1) Most of the material in the library does not circulate, but can be read in the library. The library has many reading rooms, divided somewhat by subject, with open stacks, each with some theft control. The Reading Section, for instance, has 4 reading rooms. One of these is the new reading room for computer and multimedia material. The general "Comprehensive" reading room is the one where the patron has material paged from the 4 floors and 1 million items in closed stacks. Access to this collection is via a large set of catalog cards near the reading room. The management of this Comprehensive reading room with access to the large closed stacks is given to a Stacks Department which also is doing the main part of the retrocon for the library of these books in the stacks. The Lending Section has 4 reading rooms, each with a circulation pc for loaning material to 40,000 registered borrowers. The Serials Section with a staff of 13 has 3 reading rooms, one of newspapers, and one current magazines, and one of old magazines. They have 600 newspapers and 3,500 magazines. The library has it's own bindery in the old building. Material takes about a month to get bound. The Serials reading rooms are open longest to the public, 73 hrs/wk. Most of the rest of the library goes home at 5:30 PM. The serials Section also does the cataloging of new serials titles and the normal work of checking in new issues. They use a computerized checkin system they wrote themselves in 1988. The Foreign Language Section, headed by Mr. Ke (pronounced ker, more or less), and where most of the translators who have been working with me work, has 2 reading rooms and 2 floors of closed stacks. They have 12 staff, 3 in cataloging and one in acquisitions. The collection is about 300,000 in English, Russian, Japanese, and some French and German. They have 2 Russian speakers and one Japanese; most of the staff can read English. Two of the staff can handle conversational English pretty well, but they don't get much chance to practice. The library budget comes from the Provincial government. The total staff of the library is over 200. Generally the workday is from 8:30 AM to 5:30 PM. On Thursday afternoons, the library is closed to the public and the staff use the time for self-study. Lunch is a traditional 2 hours, 2.5 in the summer. There is a cafeteria in the library; most staff eat here and then take a nap on cots they have brought. Hiring is done by posting a vacancy notice on the boards outside the library entrance. Applicants are reviewed through a couple of interview processes. There is manditory retirement at 55 for women and 60 for men. The government provides retirement income more or less equal to their pre-retirement income depending on the level of the position and other details. As in the West, many people continue to work after retirement in other jobs. The security department of 15 has two gate houses at the front gates to the library and an office just inside the front doors. They "safeguard the library". It is pretty peaceful here! Mistakes in this description are my own fault! Brian Williams 1. An Introduction to Fujian Provincial Library. Gong Yongnian. Translated by Ke Shaoning. No date.