Cao Liqun is a librarian and research secretary of the Department of Philosophy of Nanjing University
"Some things need to be done silently, you may not be able to see anything at once, but after years of doing it, it will have characteristics and effects."
qHow many years has Mr. Cao worked in the library of the Department of Philosophy?
I came to the Department Map Library in '86, and then I've been rooted and rooted until now.
qDo you work as a librarian as soon as you graduate?
I was a Chinese and loved to read since I was a child, so when I graduated, I wanted to deal with books. At that time, there were two directions after graduation, one was Nanjing University Press, and the other was our philosophy department. My mother knew that I liked to read and said that it was better and more stable that I was still in the reference room. I was young at the time, I started working in the philosophy department at the age of 22, and I worked with books all my life. I'm almost 57 years old this year and have three years to retire.
qIn the department library, what is your main job? Is there any change from before?
In the 1980s and 1990s, we had to purchase a large number of books every year, including tomes of classic literature. According to the needs of teaching and scientific research, we purchase more than 2,000 professional books every year. In addition to buying books, but also to catalog their own, thousands of books a year need to be cataloged, the workload is quite large, usually spend a lot of time on this. You look at the card cabinet over there, we have three sets of book catalog cards (title, author, classification) on this side, at that time the borrowed book is different from now, not the computer borrowing and scanning code, all need to fill in the cards by hand. Each book you want to borrow has a card in it, and after you fill it out, each person has a head card to fill out. For example, a classmate has a card for each book he borrows, and after the card is drawn out and filled out, I will arrange the cards in the cabinet, wait for him to return the book, and then find out the card and cancel it for him.
If you enter a new book, you have to arrange it according to the title, author, and classification number (into the bookcase), and I usually do this first; if there are students who come to borrow and return books, we have to receive them, which is a daily process. I also have to go to the library to get the books, and the library will call and say that the shelves of your philosophy department books and magazines are full, you come and get them, and sometimes I can't do it alone, and I will find two student assistants to push the cart to the library, tie up the books and magazines, and bring the books back. In addition, I also have a job as a scientific research secretary, and now our department is doing first-level discipline assessment, and we need to prepare materials, which I have been busy with recently. Then there are papers to sort out, we have to pick out the latest outstanding graduate student papers, label them in the bookcase for students to see.
q Have you encountered any difficulties in so many years of work?
Difficult things encountered in the work are sometimes a process of continuous learning and exploration. When I first came, there was a teacher Feng who was also working in the reference room, and Teacher Feng was quite strict with me. When I first came, he took a copy of the Dictionary of Four-Corner Numbers and said that you can read this dictionary yourself and ask me if you don't understand it. At that time, our catalogue cards and periodicals ( southwest building ) , including book titles and author catalogs , were arranged by four-corner numbers, not by stroke or pinyin. I taught myself, studied it for about two or three months, and learned it all. He took me to the library and said, "Philosophical Studies, the bound edition, you take it out for me in twenty seconds." He took a stopwatch and asked me to go in and look for it. At first it was a few seconds, no. The next day, I changed another magazine, today is "Philosophical Studies", tomorrow there is "Philosophical Dynamics", practiced many times, I can finally find it out in 20 seconds, this is considered to be passed.
q In addition to the difficulties, what makes you feel the most touched in the process of work?
The biggest impression that this job has brought me is that what I have done is still a little fulfilling. I mainly serve everyone, a library and information service, a scientific research service. My main business is library and intelligence. When Teacher Zhang Yibing was the head of the department in 1996, he arranged for me to concurrently serve as the secretary of scientific research.
So I combined library and information services with scientific research secretary work, the work of scientific research secretary needs to deal with teachers frequently, I know what project the teacher will take this year, what articles will be published tomorrow, and what books will be published, so that our intelligence service work will be targeted. You can recommend some books to him, and recently I have seen good papers related to him, and I can recommend them to him when I am together. Then I knew what books this teacher liked to borrow, and I reserved them for him. Because I know where his field of study is, where his professional direction is, and what he has been working on recently, this is a strength of serving in the department. The teacher will also send us a copy of the book, which I will put in the reference cabinet, which represents recognition of our work. Some of them are given to me personally, and they are also placed in the reference room cabinet, which is a kind of positive interaction, a virtuous circle.
In addition, I am doing scientific research myself. In 1991, I published a paper entitled "Preliminary Investigation of Active Service in University Reference Rooms" in a special issue of the Journal of Nanjing University, "Research and Exploration of Higher Education", and the responsible editor at that time was Wang Qiling, the former secretary of our department, who was the deputy director of the graduate school at that time. "Active service" in the national intelligence system is the first I put forward, but also my earliest systematic research, since then I not only engaged in service but also engaged in research, I have published more than a dozen papers in various journals across the country, including library and information journals such as "Journal of Nanjing University", "Journal of University Library", "Journal of Jiangsu Library", "Library Science Research", "Library and Information Work", "Jiangsu Social Science", "Philosophical Dynamics" and other core journals.
▲One of the papers published by Professor Cao in core journals
I've also taken two research projects, both related to library and information. One is the Nanjing University Liberal Arts University-level planning project, and the other is the Nanjing University Shichuan Outstanding Youth Education Fund. At that time, people who engaged in library and information rarely applied for projects, and it was too late to do some trivial transactional work, where there was time to write articles and take projects for research, but I did both at that time. I got married late, when I was twenty or thirty years old, I came home to write things, and I also borrowed some books to find some magazines to go home to read, and I didn't waste time, I just wanted to do more things in ordinary posts.
▲From 1998 to the present, Teacher Cao participated in the compilation of the "Yearbook of Chinese Philosophy"
In '99, I was promoted to associate research librarian, which is equivalent to associate professor, and I was 35 years old at the time, and I was the youngest associate research librarian in the school's library and information system at that time. At that time, Secretary Zhang said that Xiao Cao was not simple, and originally thought that he was working with his head buried, but he did not expect to write more than two dozen articles and many core journals.
I think, do a job, just try to do it the best.
qWhat do you think is the biggest change in the system chart from the time you joined the work to the present?
When I was in the Drum Tower campus in '86, the conditions in the Southwest Building were very difficult, and the area of the reference room was very small, but how bad were our conditions at that time? Some teaching and research rooms may not even have a room, they have no place to go after they come, all come to our reference room, sit in the reading room to read books and discuss, very lively. Sometimes some teachers give classes to graduate students without classrooms, so they take classes in the reading room of our reference room, and I listen to a lot of lessons in it.
I remember that the class given by Teacher Zhang Jiwu, who taught foreign philosophy at that time, was very wonderful; Teacher Sun Bojun gave a lecture to graduate students, which was in the reading room of our reference room, and it was also very exciting. We were very impressed by the lessons of these two teachers. Teacher Sun is very strict with the students, and his lectures are also very rigorous. Teacher Zhang Jiwu's lectures are more enthusiastic and passionate, and the style is different. I was very impressed with both of these teachers because they were in our reference room. In addition, I will listen to many lectures held by our department. I remember that in the past, Mr. Yu Muyong gave a lecture in the school auditorium, and the people sitting on the ground were all people, and the speech was very wonderful. That's why I said that the atmosphere of our Nanda University, including the environmental atmosphere of our department, is also very good.
The atmosphere of reading books at that time was different from now. At that time, there were no computers, mobile phones, all relying on reading paper literature, reading books, reading magazines, reading newspapers, everyone was working hard, one by one, full of energy. At that time, there were many people reading books, and the information room was full of people. It's different from now, everyone has a computer, electronic literature, and internet access. People may be at home, looking at things on the Internet.
Perhaps the biggest change from before is that there are fewer people. In the past, there were many people who went to the reference room to read books, and there were dozens of books at a time, and we used to have no restrictions. The teacher who borrowed the most books I later checked, borrowed more than two hundred books, borrowed at home, which is unimaginable now, isn't it? Now the conditions are good, there are scientific research funds, books and materials can be bought by themselves, and there are electronic literature on the Internet, which is completely different from that time. Now there are more books for graduate students and a little less for undergraduates. Because they (undergraduates) may sometimes go to The Great Hall more, graduate students are basically on our side, but graduate students do not come to read much, basically borrowing and returning books. In addition, they may find the environment of the odate a little more comfortable and better.
qWhat do you think is the feature of the philosophy library compared to other faculty libraries?
After the 90s, before Director Tan retired, I consulted with him and said that the data room of our philosophy department should not be large and complete, but should be small and refined, which is more in line with the characteristics of our discipline. Compared with the Faculty of Letters and the Department of History, it cannot be spelled: people have a collection of 500,000 books, a collection of 300,000 books, and our department only has 100,000 volumes. I suggested to Director Tan that our reference room should eliminate some of the books we turned in, because some of our books are very compatible with teaching and scientific research, some books are not too compatible with teaching and scientific research, the amount of copies is relatively large, and the utilization rate is not high. At that time, there were also 20,000 or 30,000 books of economic books and political history books, and many of them had copies. After Director Tan agreed, we eliminated all the copies of these books. We knocked out the books twice, and there were about 120,000 books, and twice we picked up about 30,000 books and handed them to the library. The number of books that are not too compatible with our teaching and scientific research has been greatly reduced, and the structure of the collection is more reasonable.
At that time, our department was still buying books, professional aspects were bought, and other majors may be related to the edge, but the fit with teaching and scientific research is not too big, we will not buy. Efficient use of funds is first made into a small but sophisticated reference room with books on philosophical disciplines. So now form our small but fine professional characteristics. When people came to see us, they thought that our collection of books was very professional. We're not doing libraries, we're doing professional libraries.
Since the nineties, the direction of our construction has been to this side, and now it is small and fine. What the philosophical discipline needs, what the teaching and research needs, we basically have. In addition, we also have foreign language periodicals here, and the library once wanted to send the 27 original foreign language periodicals in the department to the library, and the library said that there are few people in your philosophy department and the utilization rate is low, so it is better to put them in my library. I said that if you put it in The Great Pavilion, even fewer people will read it, and all the people who read the philosophy magazines are the teachers and students of our department, and no matter how little it is, it is better to put it in the department than the Great Pavilion. I went to Director Hong several times for this matter, and I proposed that these magazines were ordered from the eighties onwards, and that the materials of our philosophy department were continuous, and these journals were also serial publications, and all the bound editions were also in our place. In the end, Director Hong and Ōkan finally agreed, and it was difficult to keep it. Nor do I want to lose the collections we already have in my hands.
▲The graduation thesis of undergraduate students in the collection of past years
In addition, we start from the 77th class, and all the papers of undergraduate and graduate students are bound and saved. The department has thesis counters for graduate and undergraduate students, and all graduate papers from '77 to the present have them. This is our specialty, very few departments of NTU have preserved undergraduate and graduate papers from 1977 to the present, and our faculty members come to visit and must come to us to see the papers. The papers of more than a decade ago were all handwritten manuscripts, and you probably rarely have handwritten papers now.
▲ 1981 undergraduate graduation thesis manuscript, supervised by Hu Fuming
After the director of the archives Tang came to our library to see it, you are the first company in NTU to keep the paper from level 77 to the present, and as far as she knows, no department has ever kept the paper so well. Most people don't care about doing this, and the paper is kept for a few years and then disposed of. Director Wang Heng also suggested that we make a special counter for excellent graduate dissertations and outstanding doctoral dissertations for new graduate students. The binding of papers is what we have to do, and the workload is quite large every year, but this is also one of our job responsibilities, and we could not have done this, but when I thought that we had done a good job before, I felt that there should be a continuity.
▲Excellent doctoral dissertation counter
This is the result of decades of construction of literature resources, including director Tan and colleagues in the reference room, after decades of construction, these resources are left in this place, we also want to make it play a role, let the readers use. Some things need to be done silently by yourself, you may not be able to see anything at once, but if you insist on doing it over the years, it will have characteristics and effects.
q In the decades of working in the department, are there any people and things that have left a deep impression on you?
Teacher Yang Junguang is very difficult, and he goes to our library every day to read books. Since I came to work here, that is, since 86 years, I have insisted on reading books in our library every day, and I have been reading for decades. Later we moved to Xianlin, he lived in the Drum Tower, and when he was old, he didn't come. The old man was very pursuing learning, and many of his works were completed after retirement.
The student's style is not the same as the teacher, can insist on reading books in our place every day, a few years ago, there was a doctoral student of Yang Weizhong teacher, called Yang Jianxiao, from master's degree to doctoral reading in our place every day, is a good student, the conditions in his home are very good, but he does not pay attention to these eyes, he likes to read. His father hoped that he could inherit his career, the chairman and the legal representative gave him, he did not care, he wanted to read, wanted to be a teacher, had a pursuit. Now he went to Nan normal university to become a teacher. These two impressed me very deeply and can persist in coming every day. The wind comes and goes, no matter whether it is windy or rainy. Now the library is not as lively as before, because it is all electronic reading, the whole environment is like this, electronic, the source of information channels is different.
There is also a student surnamed Bei who is a graduate student of the Horse Academy and has been reading books here for two years, so I am also quite concerned about him. There are very few people who are open-minded and studious, and who can sink their hearts to read books, and he is not in a hurry to make quick profits, but really wants to learn things.
In the past, when we were in the Drum Tower, many students were good friends with me, and there was a classmate of Wang Yueqing, and I was deeply impressed by him. He is an undergraduate student in the 84th class of our department, and when I was in 86 years, he came to our library every day to read books, and he had a good relationship with me. He was a junior at the time and enjoyed graduate treatment as the first creative student selected by the department. What treatment a graduate student is, what treatment he enjoys, how many books a graduate student reads, how many books he borrows, how many books he borrows, this is the first time in the history of our department. Generally, undergraduates can only enter our library when writing academic year papers and graduation papers, and we did not allow undergraduates to enter and read books at that time. His parents were all farmers in Hai'an, Jiangsu Province, and he suffered a lot before he was admitted to Nanda, and he cherished this opportunity. You see now he's developing very well, and it's inseparable from his efforts. At that time, he read books in our place every day and absorbed a lot of nutrition, and he did not waste this time, which gave me great encouragement. As long as we read the books carefully and study carefully in our reference room, they are very successful and accomplished.
▲Teacher Sun Ben donated books
The department chart grew up with the philosophy department, and it is still very profound. Our department has preserved a bunch of Books from the Republic of China, and the staff of the library have come here before and said that they do not have these books from the Republic of China period. Among them, there is the "Outline of the History of Modern Western Philosophy" by Mr. Liu Boming, the founding head of our department, which is now displayed in our department history museum. Mr. Sun Benwen, a famous sociologist in China, has also donated a batch of books to our reference room, all of which are well preserved. There is also a very powerful place, that is, our department has retained a lot of original newspapers of that year, the Guangming Daily, which was published by Professor Hu Fuming in 1978 with the article "Practice is the Only Criterion for Testing Truth", the original newspaper published by Teacher Liu Linyuan", "Some Experiences on Investigation and Research Methods", and the original newspaper of Professor Martin's publication "Contemporary China's Economic Research is a Great Change", which have been preserved by our department's data room to this day. The Department History Museum has a wall of paper materials, which are basically from our department's reference room.
Source: "Department of Philosophy, Nanjing University" WeChat public account
Welcome to @文以 preaching