The library of Beijing Jiaotong University was founded in 1909. With the historical changes, the library has been built for three generations. The first generation of the museum is located in the old alley of Lige in the city, with a small area and few books, called the library. Later, a two-story building was built on the east side of the school gate, which increased the number of books and renamed the library. During the Anti Japanese War, the school moved southward, and the library collection lost a lot. After the victory of the Anti Japanese War, the school moved back to Peiping, and the library was restored one after another. After the liberation, the Ministry of Railways allocated a number of books collected by the Pingjin Railway Bureau, the Transportation College of North China Communications Corporation and Guan Genglin, a private railway university, to a larger extent.
In 1951, the school moved to its current location and built a second-generation museum on the west side of Minghu Lake, covering an area of 2400 square meters. In 1953, the Beijing Harbin Institute of Technology and the Beijing Harbin Institute of Technology were merged, and the museum buildings increased to 41000 square meters, and the collection increased to 310000 volumes.
At present, the library has three buildings, which are located in the main area and east area of Beijing Haidian Campus, and Weihai Campus in Shandong Province. The total area of the museum is 32900 square meters, including 12200 square meters in the main campus, 1700 square meters in the east campus, and 17600 square meters in Weihai campus. A total of 2935 reading and self-study seats are provided. The library of the main campus has 4 student study rooms.
The collection resources of Beijing Jiaotong University Library are characterized by the characteristic discipline of railway transportation of the university, and focus on multidisciplinary literature collection such as industry, management, economics, science, literature, law, philosophy, etc. The number of newly added paper books each year remains above 90000. As of December 31, 2023, the total collection is 17.912 million, including more than 2.855 million paper books, 15.058 million electronic resources, 87 database platforms, and nearly 52000 Chinese and foreign electronic journals. It has Chinese and foreign databases including Wanfang, CNKI, VIP, SCI, SSCI, EI, Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, etc. The library has collected the doctoral and master's theses of the university in a comprehensive way. It has collected outstanding undergraduate graduation theses since 2003 and undergraduate graduation theses since 2004.
In order to fully meet the needs of readers, the library is open 7 days a week, with service hours of 98 hours/week, and the study room is open for 126 hours/week. The library implements the open service mode and the open shelf service of borrowing and reading. It receives more than 1.2 million readers every year, and the average annual borrowing volume of paper books is about 210000.
Beijing Jiaotong University Library is one of the 102 university libraries that have set up the science and technology novelty search workstation of the Ministry of Education. It can provide services such as scientific and technological novelty search, retrieval and indexing, and topic based retrieval. Since 2003, the Library has established interlibrary loan relationships with nearly 60 domestic libraries, such as the National Library, Shanghai Library, Tsinghua University Library, Peking University Library, Renmin University of China Library, Beijing Normal University Library, etc., to provide interlibrary loan services. Readers can obtain the materials of the above libraries for free through the interlibrary loan service. Since 2011, it has won the BALIS Interlibrary Loan Service Advanced Collective Award, Interlibrary Loan Service Promotion Award, etc. for many consecutive years.
Since the launch of document delivery in 2004, the library has cooperated with BALIS (Beijing University Library Document Resources Guarantee System), CALIS (China Higher Education Document Guarantee System), CASHL (China University Humanities and Social Sciences Document Center), the National Library NSTL and nearly a hundred other university libraries have established contacts with scientific research institutions, which can provide our readers with convenient and fast original text delivery services. From 2009 to 2018, he won the Advanced Collective Award and Discipline Service Award of BALIS Original Text Transmission for 10 consecutive years.
Since 2017, the library has actively promoted the construction and development of the academic information data support platform of Beijing Jiaotong University in order to achieve big data analysis and evaluation based on the information management of scientific research achievements of our university and show the scientific research achievements of teachers.
On June 27, 2018, the "Beijing Jiaotong University Intellectual Property Information Service Center" was inaugurated in the library. The establishment of the center will provide important support for the school's "double first-class" construction.
The Library of Beijing Jiaotong University has a rich collection of transportation characteristics. Our collection of transportation and railway historical materials is second to none in the country. From the first official traffic newspaper of the Ministry of Posts and Communications at the end of the Qing Dynasty to the "Handover Document of Changchun Railway in China" personally signed and issued by Premier Zhou Enlai in 1953, from the "Summary of Beijing Zhangjiakou Railway Project" a hundred years ago, Up to now, we have collected all the construction materials of high-speed railway and rail transit. The library pays more attention to the collection of characteristic resources and the excavation, research, construction and utilization of resources. Digitize the characteristic resources in the library for permanent preservation, and build the "University's Thesis Database", "Jinshixuan Research Data Full Text Database", "Tanzania Zambia Railway Research Data Full Text Database", etc.
In order to cultivate readers' literature retrieval ability, the library has carried out information literacy education for students to use literature information resources throughout the university, opened literature retrieval courses, and held a lecture on "Writing Graduation Thesis by Using Library Literature Resources" for undergraduate and graduate students every year. At the same time, special lectures, training, novelty search and other services of various databases were also carried out.
The school's more than 20000 computers can search and use the library resources 24 hours a day. The library uses Aleph (book automation integration system) and DigiTool (digital resource management system) management software to manage paper resources and digital resources respectively, and provides readers with interactive services such as online book reservation, renewal, and urging return. Primo (resource discovery and acquisition system) is adopted to integrate the existing electronic books, electronic journals, electronic databases and a large number of free online database resources of the library, so as to realize one-stop retrieval of multiple resources. The mobile digital library built supports the utilization of library resources by mobile devices such as mobile phones and tablets.
Since 2003, the Library of Beijing Jiaotong University, in conjunction with the Youth League Committee, the Propaganda Department, the Humanities College and other units, has jointly carried out the "Scholarly Cup" reading and essay collection activity to guide college students to "read more and read good books". Up to now, Beijing Jiaotong University has successfully held 19 sessions of "Shuxiang Cup" reading essay solicitation activities, and achieved good results. As an important part of the school's cultural quality education, the "Shuxiang Cup" reading activity has become a well-known brand to show the moral education construction style of Beijing Jiaotong University. At the same time, the library holds "Culture Week" activities every year, and carries out various exhibitions and training lectures such as railway culture exhibitions to edify the cultural knowledge of college students, so as to improve their cultural taste and aesthetic taste. In 2006 and 2007, the library of Beijing Jiaotong University was rated as the advanced unit of reading for all by the Chinese Library Society for two consecutive years; In 2009, it was awarded the first batch of "National Reading Base" by the Chinese Library Society; In 2017, it was awarded the honorary title of Advanced Library in North China by the University Library Cooperation Committee of North China.
At present, the library has 56 staff members, who are responsible for providing literature information services for the readers of the university. Among them, there are 46 people with bachelor's degree or above, accounting for 82% of the staff in the library. There are 1 person with senior professional title, 7 people with deputy senior professional title, 31 people with intermediate professional title, and 4 assistant librarians.
With readers as the center, service as the leading factor, innovation with characteristics, and development with contributions, the library will focus on the strategic goal of the school's development, and strive to create a document information platform with railway transportation as the characteristics to meet the needs of world-class universities with distinctive characteristics, so as to provide strong information service support for the school's "double first-class" construction. By 2030, the library of Beijing Jiaotong University should be built into a distinctive and high-level smart library that is compatible with the basic pattern of a world-class university with distinctive multidisciplinary characteristics, and become an important support for talent training and scientific and technological innovation of the university.
