Wuhan University Library () is the library system of

Wuhan University Wuhan University (WHU; ) is a public research university in Wuhan, Hubei. The university is sponsored by the Ministry of Education. Wuhan university was founded as one of the four elite universities in the early republican period of China and i ...

, serving the university's students and faculty. It has 4 branches: Arts and Sciences Library, Engineering Library, Information Technology Library and Medical Library. The collection contains approximately 228,000 books & periodicals, 5,778 newspapers, 6,767,000 printing volumes, 6,590,000 e-books & e-magazines, 442 databases and 200,000 volumes of thread-bound ancient books as of 2011.

History

The predecessor of the Wuhan University Library was the Zi Qiang School founded by

Zhang Zhidong Zhang Zhidong () (4 September 18375 October 1909) was a Chinese politician who lived during the late Qing dynasty. Along with Zeng Guofan, Li Hongzhang and Zuo Zongtang, Zhang Zhidong was one of the four most famous officials of the late Qing ...

. In 1913, the National Wuchang Higher Normal College was founded, containing a small library. The library first appears in formal documents in 1917.黄宗忠,谢灼华.武汉大学图书馆五十年图书馆杂志,1963,(4). p.31-33. In 1927, the library changed its name to the National Wuhan University Library. At first there was only one book cataloger, about 3000 foreign language books, and a small number of Chinese books. In 1936 the collection grew to about 140,000 books. From 1928 to 1936, Yang Mingzhi,

Pi Zongshi Pi Zongshi (; 23 August 1887 – 1967) was a Chinese educator and politician who served as president of Hunan University from July 1936 to September 1940. Biography Pi was born into a family of farming background in Changsha, Hunan. In 1903 he w ...

and Yang Duanliu successively served as its director. The old library building on the top of Mount Shizi was built in 1935. During the

second Sino-Japanese War The Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) or War of Resistance (Chinese term) was a military conflict that was primarily waged between the Republic of China and the Empire of Japan. The war made up the Chinese theater of the wider Pacific Th ...

, the library moved to

Leshan Leshan, formerly known as Jiading or Jiazhou, is a prefecture-level city located at the confluence of the Dadu and Min rivers in Sichuan Province, China. Leshan is located on the southwestern fringe of the Sichuan Basin in southern Sichuan, abou ...

Sichuan Sichuan (; zh, c=, labels=no, ; zh, p=Sìchuān; alternatively romanized as Szechuan or Szechwan; formerly also referred to as "West China" or "Western China" by Protestant missions) is a province in Southwest China occupying most of the ...

. During the bombing in Leshan on August 19, 1939, and the plundering of books by the Japanese on March 4, 1940, many volumes were lost, and the library collection dropped to less than 100,000 volumes. It then served as an institution to preserve books, and did not allow people to borrow them. When the library returned to Luojia Hill after the war, the collection grew to 154,455 volumes. After the war, the library having received a large donation amount from the

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and North ...

and the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

, the foreign language resources increased. In 1947, some left-wing students formed a new library called June 1 Library (), the collections of which were merged into the University Library after 1949. In 2000, Wuhan University Library and its surrounding buildings were listed in the Fifth Major Historical and Cultural Site Protected at the National Level batch. Wuhan University Library values its

geomatic Geomatics is defined in the ISO/TC 211 series of standards as the " discipline concerned with the collection, distribution, storage, analysis, processing, presentation of geographic data or geographic information". Under another definition, it ...

book collections as its basic development orientation and maintains the most integrated geomatics global periodicals, foreign meeting proceedings, numerous scale relief maps and distant sensing picture photographs. The library is known especially for the foreign periodical collection, in which it has over 2700 global periodical headings, covering the earliest volumes of German technical journal Zeitschrift für Vermessungswesen, complete from the initial volume in 1873 to the present.

References

{{Authority control 1917 establishments in China Academic libraries in China Libraries in Wuhan Wuhan University