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Introduction
The 36th China Internet Network Development Statistic Report issued by CNNIC (2015) revealed that mobile phone ownership in China reached 594 million as of June 2015, and, among these cyber citizens, those surfing the internet increased from 85.8 per cent in December 2014 to 88.9 per cent. China's mobile internet era has opened up massively and mobile internet applications have emerged from this explosive growth. Smartphones, tablet PCs, PDAs and other intelligent terminal equipment have surpassed PCs as the first choice of Chinese internet users. The trend of mobile reading and communication through the internet is becoming more prominent. Mobile library services are becoming increasingly mature and successful in meeting the demands of patrons in the mobile internet era.
To satisfy the demands of patrons who access library services via smartphones and other handheld terminals, Chinese libraries have provided a variety of mobile library services. In recent years, the mobile library services of top university libraries and provincial public libraries have achieved rapid development. At present, the service modes of mobile libraries include SMS, WAP and application for mobile terminals (APP), with APP becoming the mainstream model (Wei et al. , 2014). However, many small- and medium-sized libraries in China are still unable to provide mobile services for patrons, one reason being the very huge investments that some libraries must bear so that the mobile APP can adapt itself to different mobile operating systems (Yao and Jiang, 2015). The other reason is that the promotional effectiveness of mobile services among patrons is not ideal and the performance is not obvious. Therefore, mobile library services urgently need a more economical and popular model of mobile services.
In recent years, WeChat (Wikipedia, 2015a) underwent rapid development and became the most popular social media system with the highest number of user communities in China. It opened the API interface in 2013, established the WeChat public service platform (Baidu Encyclopedia, 2015) and guided the user in serving enterprises, organizations and individuals to establish their brands. Many university libraries in China have thus established the new service modes of mobile services through WeChat Library. Since 2012, the libraries of Beijing Second Foreign Languages University, Kunming University of Science and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Tsinghua University and...