Comparative Study Of Service Of Public Library Between China And America Taking Liaoning Province And Michigan As An Example

The public library, the product of the progress of human civilization, as an important social and cultural institution, is an indispensable part in public cultural service system. Public libraries have played an effective role in terms of meeting the needs of individual and collective education, the acquisition of information and personal development. Moreover, the literacy of residents and environment of society and culture are greatly enhanced with the help of public libraries.The core of system public service of culture is ‘service’, whose fundamental task is to provide people with basic public cultural services and to achieve the civil equalization of basic public cultural services. The responsibility of public libraries is to improve public cultural service system. The new era has witnessed public libraries to focus back on public benefits. Since the 18 th CPC Party Congress in 2012, our government has paid much more attention to public cultural undertakings making the development of public libraries enter a new historical stage. However, compared with the United States and other developed countries, public libraries in our counties manifest many defects in terms of both hardware and software.Taking ‘service’ as the starting point, the dissertation firstly presents the definitions of public libraries and their services. Then a review of the public library development process of two countries is given in order to grasp a comprehensive understanding of their status quo, which serves as the research background and theoretical foundation for the subsequent comparative analysis.Secondly, taking public libraries in Liaoning and Michigan as two samples, I venture to compare the different service indexes between the two cities and analyze the variation of the trends in each object based on extensive data collection and reporting.Finally, the previous comparative analysis has thrown light upon the gaps between the two countries in terms of public library service. Advanced managerial experience and idea of library service in the United States inspires the development of public library services of our country.