Article Preview
Top1. Introduction
Our lifestyles have been completely revolutionized with the rapid development of the mobile Internet. Mobile phones, as the most popular electronic Internet terminal, have deeply contributed to the learning process of people. Since there are more and more mobile users in the world, figuring out ways to use modern technology to promote the rapid development of industries, such as science, education, culture, health and the entire social and human environment has become a difficult task. Globally, in the era of mobile Internet, mobile information services have been integrated into various fields. With the constant improvements in electronic developments and global electronic infrastructure, mobile digital libraries have formed an important role in humanities education. According to the “42nd Statistical Report on China's Internet Development Status” of the China Internet Network Information Center (2018), mobile phone users reached 98.3% as of June 2018, exceeding personal computer usage and becoming the first largest Internet terminal device. What’s more, increasing numbers of people will use mobile devices to read in their leisure time with the launch of applications such as WeChat and Weibo.
The digital library on mobile devices has been a milestone in library industry development, leading to huge changes in knowledge carrying, spreading, acquiring, processing and sharing of cloud computing and big data in online and offline forms of the popular O2O. Customer needs nowadays can be real-time, fast, unconditional and personalized, fundamentally changing the traditional library knowledge service system. Social sharing functions such as reading, borrowing, sharing, comment tracking, automatic retrieval and new book recommendations on mobile devices such as mobile phones have become the popular trend of digital library development. The mobile digital library brings together many functions, such as resource application and information acquisition. In the United States, the penetration rate of mobile digital libraries has already been over 90%. Libraries such as the Ohio Public Library, the library of University of Virginia, and other American university libraries have provided functions such as watching news, lecture information reminders, book reminders and SMS services, mobile portals to meet the needs of citizens. The development of services for mobile application customers in digital libraries enable users to access the resources and services of digital libraries anytime and anywhere (Zha et al., 2015). The most typical and widespread is the digital library App, which can both collecting information and reading at the same time. Weibo and WeChat are also important platforms for online reading. In the survey of Gan (2016), 82.6% of public libraries opened mobile services in WeChat platform (Gan, 2016).
Comparing the development of mobile digital libraries between China and other countries, it is not difficult to see that China is still in the process of exploration and design. More and more universities, such as Tsinghua University and Peking University, have begun to construct digital libraries and have developed more functions such as borrowing books, online browsing and social functions such as sharing and commenting. With the development of mobile applications in digital libraries, demographic factors have received more and more attentions in system applications. Academic studies also pay more attentions from the perspective of users (Marchionini, Plaisant and Komlodi, 1998). Therefore, based on the existing literatures, empirical studies on the important factors affecting the users' willingness and behaviors of digital libraries have very important theoretical and practical implications.