Abstract:

The theoretical study of library rights has been developed with great attention since 2004 in China. Against this background, this paper tries to carry out an empirical study and applies a questionnaire and interview survey on people’s library rights in Guangdong Province. Adopting the library rights policy system of American Library Association’s Library Bill of Rights and its interpretations as the theoretical foundation, while the authors’ hypothesis on the understanding about library rights of practitioners and people is also considered, it constructs an investigation target system including four dimensions, namely, the possession, recognition, sense and expectation of library rights, according to which, different questionnaires and interview outlines are designed for the different samples of users and librarians, both drawn randomly through multistage sampling. This paper pictures the general information about the people’s library rights in Guangdong Province by presenting the data collected through questionnaires. Then it proves the differences, as well as their degree and causes of formation, by doing a complex analysis which takes the factors of region, administrative level, user or librarian, possession or sense into account. Meanwhile, it reveals some implicit demands of the practical areas on library rights, as well as some existing problems which affecting not only the library rights buts also many more practical issues. Eight tables. Nine figures. Ten references.

Keywords: Library rights；Public libraries；Guangdong province；ALA&rsquo, s Library Bill of Rights