Promoting Equal Access to Public Digital Cultural Services in China: Efforts and Challenges

Abstract

With the development of information technology and the advent of the digital era, the digitization of cultural heritage and the internet-based equal access to the digitized heritage have received worldwide attention. Taking China as a case study, this paper reviews its efforts and challenges to promote equal access to public digital cultural services (PDCS). It starts by introducing the efforts, including PDCS-related legislations, policies and standards issued by the government, and major government-initiated PDCS projects. They are followed by an analysis of its challenges, including deficiencies in government funding, internet penetration, broadband access rates in the Central and Western regions and rural areas, and the limited digital literacy, cultural knowledge, and income levels of certain population groups. This study concludes with the suggestion that promoting equal access to PDCS in less developed regions, rural areas, and vulnerable groups is still an important task in China, and the government needs to work with private sector partners to overcome the challenges.

Construction of Digital Platform of Religious and Cultural Resources Using Deep Learning and Its Big Data Analysis

“…Wanyan and Dai proposed to reconstruct the intangible cultural heritage information by means of digital technology to adapt to the modern information environment under the condition of changing the original environment of the intangible cultural heritage and promote the informatization survival and development of the intangible cultural heritage [ 11 ]. Tsivolas pointed out that with the changes in the living conditions of cultural heritage and the rapid development of science and technology, many traditional protection methods are no longer suitable, and new protection methods are needed to replace them.…”

An exploration of ethnic minorities' needs for multilingual information access of public digital cultural services

“…The concept of PDCS was first proposed and presented by the Chinese government in 2011, which combined with the actual development situation of China (Wanyan and Dai, 2019). In contrast, similar projects in the world began in the 1990s and created a lot of typical projects for exploring collaborative electronic resources of LAM (libraries, archives and museums).…”

“…Xiao et al (2016) also introduced the role expectation framework to analyze how to cooperate with different institutions of PDCS to integrate all roles, like initiators, leaders, supporters and implementers. According to Wanyan and Dai (2019), there were remarkable differences in government funding, ICT propagation, peoples' cultural and digital information literacy of PDCS because of regional differences, especially in the less-developed central and western regions. Recent research has suggested that rural residents enjoy fewer kinds of cultural consumption than urban residents who prefer to visit websites of public cultural institutions or read e-periodicals (Wanyan and Hu, 2019).…”

“…Nevertheless, the content of PDCS is broader than LAM and legally defined by Public Cultural Service Guarantee Law. It involves digitalizing cultural facilities, products, activities and other related services to meet the citizens' basic cultural needs (Wanyan and Dai, 2019). Many projects have been carried out by the Chinese government, such as National Cultural Information Resources Sharing Project dating back to 2002, which is also named by National Digital Cultural Network.…”

Users' perception of rural public digital cultural services in China

“…Public digital cultural services refer to the digital sharing of cultural heritage to the public (Wanyan & Dai, 2019). In particular, RPDCS can be defined as the PDCS in rural areas which are provided to meet the basic cultural needs of rural users and guarantee their basic cultural rights.…”