One-year-old, Beijing Library serves book lovers with passion

Friday marks the first anniversary of the opening of Beijing Library, located in Tongzhou district, Beijing municipality.

At a news conference held to celebrate the birthday on Friday, Beijing Library has listed out numbers signifying its achievements in the year that passed.

In the first 88 days since opening, Beijing Library had received a whole million readers in all, and now its annual number of visitors has already exceeded 3.7 million. Among them, the youngest visitor was 0-year old, and the oldest was 93.

Throughout the year, the library hosted over 3,400 events, including urban concerts, intangible cultural heritage exhibitions, and classical poetry appreciation sessions, benefiting 18 million people both online and offline.

In collaboration with libraries from eight provinces and municipalities along the Grand Canal, the Beijing Library launched activities such as intangible cultural heritage exhibitions, cultural and tourism exhibitions, with a most significant of them being themed "The Grand Canal in Poetry and Prose", which initiative allowed participants to explore canal cities and retrace the path of the Grand Canal.

Thanks to all the achievements, in October the Beijing Municipal Library stood out among 16 libraries from 10 countries worldwide, winning the Public Library of the Year Award presented by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA). This was the first time a Chinese library received this prestigious honor in the global public library community.

On the same day, the Beijing Library announced a series of favorable policies for readers to meet their diverse and convenient public cultural service needs. For example, by activating the library card authentication service on smartphones, readers can use their social security cards to enjoy services such as borrowing books.

In the new year, the Beijing Library will also host over 1,000 sessions of reading activities that include reading guidance for readers so young as being infants, marking the beginning of newborn reading. Additionally, there will be efforts to promote Grand Canal culture through reading activities, which will integrate cultural exchange and tourism elements.

The Beijing Library also officially launched new scenarios for its smart reading service. The naked-eye 3D reading of two classic ancient books, namely Compendium of Materia Medica on herbals and The Exploitation of the Works of Nature on ancient technologies are now online, allowing readers to directly "touch" virtual images, transforming static pages into dynamic perceptions. With the help of AI, the smart desktop also provides readers with original reading and assisted reading functions, such as translation, glossary, and excerpts, helping them fully understand the text and acquire information and knowledge in a more efficient and intelligent way.

Mao Yajun, director of the Capital Library, stated that in the new year, the Beijing Municipal Library will provide top-notch service management to offer readers a first-class reading and cultural experience.