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Reference services have been developed in China for nearly a century; however literature shows that very little research has been done on users' perception of reference services in Chinese academic libraries. To fill the research gap, this study aims to examine how Chinese undergraduates perceive, understand and use the reference service. A survey was employed and conducted in a comprehensive Chinese university with about 19,000 undergraduate students. 433 valid questionnaires were received. ANOVA was adopted to examine overall reference service satisfaction variation among respondents in different programs. The study reveals that library resources and reference services have been improved in China during the past twenty years, especially with the great support of Project 211 and Project 985 by the Ministry of Education of China. However, there is still more to do to change libraries from book repositories to modern user-centered information services and to improve historically underdeveloped user services in Chinese libraries. Libraries and librarians in China need to more actively embrace the philosophy that library resources are to be used and librarians are there to serve, to thoroughly promote reference services and render them more visible, and to diligently learn, adopt and apply technology to provide quality reference services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Student deep participation in library work allows students to actively participate in library operation and become deeply involved in library service and program development. There are usually two levels of deep participation: level I refers to the employment of student assistants in different areas of library routine work, ranging from shelving to IT support; and level II refers to the engagement of students as library partners or collaborators, working with librarians to complete independent project. Sharing Tsinghua University Library's experiences, we provide a holistic view of how the two levels of student deep participation are implemented at an academic library, with a focus on level II. We seek to generate a thorough understanding of the practices and benefits of student deep participation, and encourage academic libraries to create more opportunities to deeply involve students in library work, and to ultimately demonstrate the value and relevance of the library to the campus community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the growth of international student enrollment in Chinese universities, user perception has become an area of developing research in academic libraries. China's policy of opening up has led to the education and economic reforms allowing major universities to enroll international students. These changes have created an increasing need for libraries to be responsive to the information needs of these students. In order to serve these students better, universities will be expected to further understand how academic library services are currently perceived by international students. This is particularly the case at Wuhan University, which has experienced significant growth in international student enrollment. This study aims to discover the met and unmet needs as well as barriers encountered in library use by international students. Based on the information gathered, recommendations and future strategies will be formulated to improve the understanding of the information needs of non-native Chinese speakers in both the provision of services and the building of collections. The findings of this study reveal that Chinese academic libraries are considerably well perceived by international students. It also indicates that they have differing purposes, and differing needs for library services and information resources. This paper acknowledges that the study is limited to Wuhan University; however, there is a need for further studies on non-Chinese speakers, particularly, international students to obtain important information on their perception of library services and information resources. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Chinese academic libraries have been devoting great effort into introducing next-generation online public access catalogs (OPACs) in order to provide a better user experience. However, there is a lack of empirical research on their usage. In this study, a transaction log file from a typical next-generation OPAC, the Wuhan University Library OPAC, formed the basis for an investigation of users' information behavior, using a clickstream data analysis framework. The 26,732,368 clickstream records in the original log file were cleaned, parsed, coded, then analyzed at the footprint, movement, and pathway levels. The results showed that the users relied heavily on the single-box simple search interface, seldom involved themselves in an exploratory search process, and preferred page navigation over search refinement when interacting with search results. The OPAC was used as a lookup tool to locate known academic resources and as a personal information management tool to utilize basic library services, instead of as a discovery tool as intended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]