Abstract
Libraries are seeing a significant shift in acquisition habits as physical libraries and their workers, services, and users are deeply impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Users now look to libraries to assist them by providing digital resources, tools, or knowledge products via knowledge service platforms for learning and research. The trend reflects how the library's role as an online solution provider widens and they are required to be more adept at managing repositories and innovative services development. This chapter is to share the endeavors and experiences of the National Agricultural Library of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences in knowledge services during the unprecedented and uncertain time, which is a process full of change and perseverance, with the hope that it will inspire library colleagues and exchange ideas.
TopBackground Of National Agricultural Library Of Caas
National Agricultural Library (NAL) of Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS) (Figure 1), situated at Beijing’s Haidian District, is supervised by the Agricultural Information Institute (AII) of CAAS, a national nonprofit research institution. The library has over 21 million volumes of literature, 310,000 books, about 16 million periodicals, and 13,000 ancient books, with the mission to advance scientific innovation in the field of agricultural information and to provide agricultural information services nationwide. Established in 1957 with funds from the Chinese government, CAAS NAL became Agricultural Sub-center for the National Science and Technology Library (NSTL) in 2000 and is also the National Agriculture Science Data Center (AgriData).
The library, comprised of four operational departments (Table 1), serves as a public library in agriculture and provides a variety of services that include reading and study space, borrowing & lending books, consulting service, and other comprehensive information services with more than 10 platforms like National Agricultural Information System (NAIS), Agricultural Knowledge Service System (AKSS), Agricultural Science and Technology Information Resources Sharing Platform, etc. It’s noteworthy that the virtual space of CAAS NAL also serves as an academic and research library, which provides services for to users including over 5,000 professional employees and 5,000 master and Ph.D. students of CAAS, 25 academicians in agriculture, 850 agricultural research institutions, over 3800 agriculture-related enterprises, and other registered users.
Figure 1.
National agricultural library of CAAS
Key Terms in this Chapter
Academic and Research Library: A library that supports teaching, learning, critical thinking, research, and collaboration on campus and provides core support for faculty and student research, development offices, campus information technologies, and alumni.
Knowledge Discovery: The process of finding existing knowledge that applies to a situation.
Knowledge Graph: Knowledge Graph represents semantics by describing entities and their relationships, and is essentially a semantic knowledge base with a directed graph structure.
COVID-19: A new strain of coronavirus that has not been previously identified in humans before 2019.
Artificial Intelligence: A branch of computer science that can simulate human intelligence and is implemented in machines to perform tasks that require human intelligence.
Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS): Knowledge Organization Systems is intended to encompass all types of schemes for organizing information and promoting knowledge management, and used to organize materials for retrieval and to manage a collection.