Influence On The Occuring Of Chinese Modern Library From The Western Missionaries

The once glorious and ancient Library, as a wonderful piece of world civilization, played a significant role in preserving books and passing the Chinese civilization on. However, with the great change of Chinese society, the feudal culture declined, while the trend to learn from the western science and culture gradually rose. Ancient Library no longer met the needs of social development. The ancient Library, based on the feudal economy, also lost the glory of the past and declined, but it has laid a solid material foundation for the formation of China's modern library.In the process of Learning from the Western world, Western missionaries served as the media for the East-West cultural exchanges. At the very beginning they desired to spread the gospel of "God,"to China, to promote Christian propaganda, but the first missionaries to China ended in failure. On one hand, Chinese people did not accept missionaries; On the other hand, in the "overwhelming Confucianism" country, people had shown great exclusion and resentment to Christianity. Summing up the lessons of failure, missionaries changed the strategy, so promoting Western culture and other new technologies replaced the direct preaching, which aroused strong interest of Chinese people, therefore the Western culture gradually infiltrated into China.In this process, the Western missionaries contributed a lot to the Enlightenment of Library science by translating, writing , importing Western literature into China, and running new libraries. The practice of opening the libraries to the public, the new reader-oriented services, the diversification of collecting books, advanced methods of sorting and cataloguing books, all the above were gradually understood and accepted by Chinese people. The ideology of Western libraries in China also gradually expanded; all of these had played a role in the Enlightenment of China's Modern Library. The Wen Hua Library College run by Ms.Hui Dihua, had became a model for China's education of Library science.China's modern library is a product of the Western ideology and culture imported to China. But the Ancient Library had existed in China for thousands of years, and had been deeply-rooted. It is not simply an overnight change only because of the Western missionaries coming to China for several times, and its change is the result of the interaction of internal and external factors. That is, the impact of Western missionaries was not isolated, there was also the mutual influence of different factors such as China's Westernization Group, the reformers and advanced intellectuals and the Qing government. Those factors merged into a symphony of library modernization, and contributed to the formation of modern library.In a literature Resource-shared world today, the discussion on the formation of China's modern library, the exploration of the role of missionaries will be of great benefit to the modernization and construction of the library today.