Search

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]

Academic libraries in Macao, China, began to use the term "information literacy" and to offer information literacy programs approximately three years ago. At the University of Macau, information literacy is considered important to help the honors students become junior researchers. Using the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education as the teaching guide, the University of Macau Library offered one-time research workshops to second-year honors students in 2017 and 2018. The challenges included the variety of subjects studied by the honors students, a lack of understanding of the students' information literacy skills prior to the workshop, and limited opportunities to examine the long-term learning impact. The workshop convinced the students of the importance of information literacy. Raising awareness of the importance of information literacy to the students and educators campus wide, offering workshops to one or two disciplines, and forming a university library team to create and implement a compulsory information literacy exam are recommended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]