No abstract

Listening to young children’s voices is crucial to improving children’s library services. The first step is unveiling how young children think about the library. Thus, researchers recruited the Mosaic approach including photography, interview, and drawing to explore the features of children’s libraries in children’s perspectives in six libraries in China. The results indicate that first, the children’s library is a “primary third place”. Second, the children’s library is an overlapping of home and society. Third, children can read books in the children’s library, but not just read. Fourth, the children’s library improves children’s awareness as patrons. It is suggested that young patrons already form initial understandings of the library, begin to complain about any problems, and put forward requirements for the library. Additionally, their interpersonal needs should be paid attention to. Therefore, librarians and researchers should respect the rights of children and listen to their voice when designing and providing library services associated with children.

The circulation service is an important, traditional library service. Circulation policies are the rules that govern borrowing and renewing materials and the penalties for overdue, lost, or damaged items. Some studies have reported the circulation policies of major academic libraries; however, literature documenting the borrowing privileges of Chinese libraries is scant and does not fully disclose its current characteristics and status. This study aims to investigate and explore the status, features, and patterns of circulation policies employed in the top 46 Chinese university libraries. The results indicated that circulation practices vary among libraries but common trends exist, including lengthened checkout and renewal period or unlimited borrowing length, increased number of items and no overdue fines or blocks on accounts until items are returned, or volunteer service, or online examination of library rules and regulation, or establishment of amnesty days regarding overdue procedures. Along with adding to the Chinese academic library services research field, these findings provide valuable directions for library policy improvements.

Young children’s perceptions of library services are often ignored when providing library services to this group. In order to reveal young children’s perceptions, grounded theory technique was used to analyze the interview data from 92 young Chinese children. The authors first proposed an integrated model of young children’s perceptions of Chinese public libraries, including the elements of books, physical spaces, rules, and people. Subsequently, the model is compared to the adult experts’ perspectives, revealing that young children could perceive all the experts’ proposed services and functions. Besides, they could perceive rules in libraries. Furthermore, young children were able to convert the abstract library classification index system to perceptible clues. The findings could be used to improve library services to accurately conform to young children’s perspectives.

No abstract