The Research On Boone Library (1910-1938)

Protestant missionaries in1870in London Robert Morrison in China began in China, missionary and educational work started nearly two centuries. With penning the five Commercial ports, the educational and missionary work in parallel. In the half of the nineteenth century, trading ports as well as inland towns cities have set up religious schools, school facilities are also becoming a larger scale. In the nineteenth century, many church schools has been expanded, upgraded, and gradually developed into high school, with the shape of University. The early twentieth century, the church began a large number of university development, about14Christian colleges established in this period:Soochow University (1901), Boone University (1903), Aurora University (1903), University of Nanking (1910), the Zhejiang University (1911), Jinling Women’s University (1915), West China Women’s University of Arts (1914), West China Union University (1910), Jiang Hu University (1915), Lingnan University (1916), Qilu University (1917), Yenching University (1919). Church College in institutions, agencies, programs, courses, methods, rules and regulations as well as many other aspects, a more direct mode of introduction of modern western education, the process of educational modernization in China, to some extent play the role model and guide. Church University College Library is to introduce the Church into the modern Western mode of education is an important expression, University Library rid the church’s private library in the traditional Chinese thinking, to enlighten the people the library into a major cultural institutions and services for public and social undertakings, and thus open the floor to the Chinese Modern Library collection process. The Boone Library was one of typical church university library in modern Hubei. This is one of new public library in the early modern China.The Boone Library was established by Mary Elizabeth Wood, a missionary of Protestant Episcopal Church in1910, which was the Boone University Library. In1899, an American Christian Miss Mary Elizabeth Wood went to Wuchang to visit her brother who was served at the Boone University, then employed as an English teacher. Soon she found the books of Boone University was poor, teachers and students have no books to read, so she collected newspapers and books and built a school library, which is reading room, the predecessor of the Boone Library. Mary Elizabeth Wood was ready to build the Boone Library in1903, and it was finished in1910. The Boone Library was not only a church university library’, the Boone Library also opened to the general public. It put into practice the system of open access, carried out the traveling library, trained a large number of library professionals, and promoted The New Library Campaign, and then became an influential public library not only in Wuhan and in the country. This paper mainly discusses some aspects of the Boone Library, including the establishment and the development history, the analysis of features and the affections. It emphatically analyzes the Bonne Library’s four features:collection features, the sources of funding, circulation services and training library professionals, which are attempt to restore a true history of the Boone Library.