A Decade Of A Migrant Community Library

In recent years, an increasing number of private non-profit libraries are springing up around China, most of them serving rural areas and migrant communities. With their diversified content and community spirit, they are, to some extent, making up for the absence of governmental effort in library service. Understanding how these libraries work may shed light on how to improve education and cultural development at the grassroot level.The project sets its focus on a private non-profit library in one of Beijing’s largest migrant communities. The project is based on interviews conducted over the last three months (from December,2013to March,2014) with relevant parties in the library’s daily operation including the curator, librarian, volunteers, readers and residents in the neighborhood, as well as research of the library’s archives in the past9years.The project chronicled the library’s journey in the past decade, as it thrived and struggled from a school library to a non-profit community library. The interviews and research find that, compared to government-funded libraries, the private ones have displayed features of a dynamic bottom-up approach in advancing reading and education, despite lacking a repeatable and consistent mode of financing.The project consists of a multimedia report with video, animation and pictures, as well as a written feature story and a critical paper.