The changing trends in a rapidly evolving information society ask the LIS education to play a more and more important role in directing LIS professional not only by providing renowned degree programs in LIS schools but also by leading advanced continuing education for librarians.
Under the background of China’s public culture policies, GuangZhou started to build a public library services system named "Guangzhou City of Libraries" in 2015. The current situation of human resources is the key problem to be solved, specifically, the severe shortage of workforce, the professionalism disqualification, and the unsatisfactory continuing education (Zhang, et.al., 2019a). According to the status survey, the continuing education which is mostly provided by local library associations, cannot satisfy the needs which manifests in limited coverage of training themes and audiences (Zhang, et.al., 2018).
This is a further study based on the data and results of the series of formal studies conducted by the authors. An implementation plan of librarians’ continuing education for "Guangzhou City of Libraries" in the next two years has been drafted with a part of a detailed plan using e-learning to help make the continuing education professional, systematic, thematic, long-term tendency and extensive and fulfill new demands.
This e-learning part, together with the whole draft implementation plan, will be presented to an advisory group. Adopting questionnaire and interview as the methods, the opinion of the advisory group on the feasibility, availability, validity, authority and risk of using e-learning in continuing education for large number of librarians in "Guangzhou City of Libraries" will be collected and analyzed. The opinion on the implementation plan of e-learning to fulfill new demands of librarians’ continuing education will be summarized and discussed
