As “Beacons of Culture”, rural libraries fulfill farmers’ thirst for knowledge and high-quality cultural life. This year, Haiyan has worked hard to build new-type rural libraries through improving facilities, innovating operation and integrating resources, and improve the culture brand “Books within Reach” to create more reading and study spaces for farmers and fortify rural cultural revitalization.

It is scorching now, but it is cool in the Wusheng Village’s rural library,  where villagers read with their children every day, and the staff play color-word recognition games with preschoolers. With an area of 350 m² and a collection of over 5,000 books, this rural library falls into four zones respectively for books collection, reading, e-resources collection and and cultural activities. It used to be plagued by outdated facilities, slow renewal of reading resources and weak appealing to readers, so efforts have been made to redesign the old library by building parent-child reading corners and interactive areas, etc. to make it more friendly and functional.

How to activate reading resources and provide precision services is the key to upgrading this village’s library. Wusheng Village has established a monthly book rotation system with Haiyan Library, ensuring reading materials are renewed regularly. It has launched a book-sharing initiative to encourage villagers to share their books with others. Since 2012 when rural libraries of the county were available to all villages, such problems had popped up such as mismatched resources, low service efficiency and shortage of investment, so the county has worked hard to improve its rural libraries and the brand “Books within Reach” by management-use integration, cross-village cooperation, and multi-directional resource sharing.

With an area of 1,300 m² and a collection of 40,000 books, the library of Yongqing Village is equipped with a facial recognition system, a self-checkout device and a smart display screen. Local residents can borrow the books here after face scanning. Yongqing Village has introduced professional operators for its rural library, extended the library’s operation hours from 6 to 12, and organized a series of reading activities to ensue the villages’ reading needs can be met.

Recently, Pang Weihua, a provincial-level intangible cultural heritage inheritor, gave a lecture on Shendang Shaoxing Wine making techniques to over 20 children in the new-style rural library of Yongqing Village. Now in Shendang Town there are 12 rural libraries, among which nine have been upgraded. The town has taken Yongqing Village and Wusheng Village selected as demonstration sites for the construction of new-style rural libraries, built hub-type central reading rooms, allocated reading resources among different villages, enhanced the circulation of books and extended their services to eight administrative villages and one community. Since the beginning of this year, this county has organized more than 200 reading activities, serving over 20,000 readers. The new-style rural libraries have become an important force in create culturally favorable environment.