Information porter: A study on intangible cultural heritage databases of provincial public libraries in china

Interest in intangible cultural heritage (ICH) from UNESCO and other groups has grown in recent years, precipitating the need for greater attention to digital ICH and ICH databases in this area. This research aims to measures the ICH databases, and to explore the role of public libraries in the protection of ICH. [Methodology] According to accessing the websites of 31 provincial public libraries in China, the study collects and analyses the names, copyright, metadata of the ICH databases. [Finding] The research finds that more than 60% provincial public libraries have ICH database, and there are three kinds of ICH database's name, the copyright of databases belongs to provincial public libraries, the National Cultural Information Resources Sharing Project, and Superstar Co., Ltd. The metadata used by each database is not uniform. [Conclusion] Those databases are still in the record stage, mainly for publicity and display ICH projects, can't reaching the goal of digital inheritance. The lack of national uniform standards also leads to disunity of naming and metadata on databases. Libraries just play the role of information porters without more innovations. Copyright © 2018 by Association for Information Science and Technology