China Film Archive, Apabi and CIBTC
by Jing Liu ~ November 2nd, 2008. Filed under: Libraries in China.Our delegation boarded the bus on time for October 17th visits. The Film Archive has just started various projects as the world has growing interest in Chinese films. The National Film Archive Database is one of them. I enjoyed the tour of the compact stack and the digital processing lab. I asked for a list of the reference books published by the library, that I hope to buy in the near future. Mr. Zhao, the head of the library said that we could order movie posters as well.Apabi’s content has been shown in Seattle the Summer Institute, and its price model has been changed and sounded like more flexible. I would like to use recent reference requests to test out the databases. Several of us had headache; the conference room was too hot and dry. Starbucks coffee helped us to survive the day, but Stephen was obviously quiet and sick.
The most exciting visit of the day was to see how the books were sorted and processed in the suburban clearing house. CIBTC provides shelf-ready books to many libraries in the world. The scale and the speed shocked us. Wang Tong introduced the head, who looked like in early 20’s, and her staff looks even younger. They work like crazy and completely ignored us as visitors. No wonder China is growing so fast. Wang Tong brought a projector to the resturant to show us her new online order system, which had been improved according to our comments in July.
