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 yesterday 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 meters. The area of the current NLC building is 170,000 square meters.
(China Daily April 3, 2001)
