Brief Review on the History and Present Situation of China s Information Resources Development

Chapter 7 - Information Resources Development in China: History, Present Situation and Problem Discussion
Managing IT in Government, Business & Communities
by Gerry Gingrich (ed)
Idea Group Publishing 2003

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Brief Review on the History and Present Situation of China's Information Resources Development

History of Information Resources Development in China

In its several thousand years of social progress, China has put continuous efforts on cultural development. Various ancient Chinese dynasties, such as the Han, Tang, Song, Ming, and Qing, carried out large-scale cultural development movements, which to a certain extent contributed to the exploitation and utilization of information resources.

Since the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the government has been attaching great importance to information resources development. In 1956, the government set "March Towards Science" as the directing principle for the course of information resources management, and made a conscientious plan in information resources development with the emphasis on collecting, rearranging, analyzing, indexing, and reporting scientific and technical documents from home and abroad to serve the needs of professionals in various disciplines. Until 1987, the scientific and technical information sector alone has already possessed 26,000 foreign periodicals, 6,000 domestic periodicals, 120 million patent manuals, and more than 32 million books. There were 236 abstracting and indexing journals published annually, covering more than 1.2 million documents and articles. Besides this, there were 2,038 public libraries at county and higher levels, collecting more than 200 million books; 745 academic libraries, collecting 250 million books; and more than 4,000 libraries in research institutes (collection of these libraries was not revealed, but the 1,400 libraries in the Chinese Academy of Sciences alone collected more than 18 million books) (Guan, 1988).

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, however, information resources development was affected by the readjusting of China's economy. Non-profitable libraries and information service institutions suffered from a severe shortage of money for collection development. As a result, information resources development was captured in a severe logjam or even retrogress. Types of document collections in some libraries dropped by one-half or even two-thirds (Fu, 1996). Many abstracting and indexing journals stopped publication. On the other hand, there emerged some new abstracting and indexing journals as well as bibliographical databases, which catered to market demand.

Since the mid-1990s, under the promotion of the tide of the information superhighway construction in many countries, information resources development in China entered a new phase.

In 1997, the Chinese government constituted the "Draft on China's Informationalization," drawing the outline of China's information infrastructure (Zou, 1997), which includes six elements as follows:

• Information Resource

• National Information Network

• Information Technology (IT) Application

• Information Industry

• Information Professional

• Information Policy, Code and Standard

Information resource was set as the primary element among the six, which showed the state's emphasis on its development. This also indicated that people once again realized the importance of information resources development. Several years later, the proposal was accepted as a part of China's tenth "five-year plan," which marked that information resources development became the central task of China's informationalization drive.

Academic Research on Information Resources Development

Information resources development has consistently been a research hotspot for Chinese librarians and information professionals. In a search conducted in the Chinese Journal Full-text Database ^[1] by limiting the phrase "information resources development" to title, a total of 273 articles were returned. The foci of the articles range from document resources development to the construction of the information superhighway, from scientific and technical information resources development to information resources development for social sciences, from information resources development at the national or international level to information resources development at the regional level. Some articles focus on the development of a specific type of information resource, such as database development or Internet information resources development. Some articles focus on development of information resources in one of the social sectors, such as agricultural information resources development, national defense information resources development, aquatic information resources development, or geological information resources development. Most of the articles of this type appear in journals of respective disciplines. Many articles review the achievement of information resources development in China, analyze its problems, and put forward suggestions for its future development.

The concept "Information Resources Development" used in this paper refers to the collection, processing, organization and dissemination of document resources, as well as their digitalization and networking. Fact and data resources ought to be included in the concept. However, China's progress in these aspects is relatively slow. In recent years, people started to realize the importance of fact and data resources development. The departments concerned have started to work out a plan for constructing a National Data Center.

^[1]Chinese Journal Full-text Database covers more than 6,000,000 academic papers that appear in more than 6,600 major Chinese academic journals.

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