Of American University Library Service And Service Concepts In The New Communications Technology Environment

Library, from where people used to retrieve knowledge, is an essential organization to human civilization history. It is developed constantly and becomes more and more diverse in order to meet people’s diverse needs. To distinguish traditional library and modern library, one of the best ways is to observe how a library implements technologies. These technologies have made significant changes on the behaviors of libraries, the behaviors of user using library, service philosophy and even the operation and management modes of library. In this thesis, the author did many researches on the relevant history records of library services and professional references. The results of these researches can be used as the theoretical base of the thesis. For the practical base, the author has thought about many conditions and limitations. There are many university libraries can be used as examples, and it is really difficult to choose from these university libraries as representatives. Considering the author him self s education background and current situation, he decided to find two modern university libraries with attributes of great services, deploying advanced technology, creativity and finality as the practical examples.The two chosen universities are Ball State University and Ohio State University. Ball State University is located in Muncie, Indiana. It has about21000students and it is mainly sponsored by state government. The author was an exchanged graduate student majored in Information and Communication Sciences at Ball State University when he was doing this thesis. At the same time, he was also a registered graduate student of Yunnan University, which was his original graduate school. The reason the author choosing Ball State University was that Ball State University was very suitable to be a good representative among the U.S. state universities. Its library and information technology deployment is performed very well. Ohio State University is an extraordinary comprehensive university, which is famous for its education quality, academic achievements and student’s population. It is a top50university in the United State. Ohio State University has more than65000students and a very large campus. To serve this large student population, it has set many libraries and implemented many advanced technologies for students’different purposes to use. In general, Ohio State University stands for the top-level state university in United State.For better collecting information from the two universities’libraries to meet the expected level, the author chose survey method and field study method from the research methodology for this thesis. Through analyzing the results concluded from researches, the author created a model to show how advanced information and communication technology makes impacts and influences on the American modern university library services and service philosophy.