图书馆伴随着知识的丰富而出现,千百年来一直起着知识收集与存储的作用。随着知识在人类社会进程中的增加,知识的开发功能在图书馆中显露出来,而且愈来愈受重视。但我们在强调其知识功能的同时,也不应该忽视它的教育功能。为此,一些有识之士认为:图书馆理应成为公民终身教育的第二课堂。所谓终身教育,是指人生受教育的总和。“终身教育”一词始见于1919年的英国,第二次世界大战以后广见于教育文献。1965年联合国教科文组织成人教育局局长、法国成人教育专家朗格朗在提交给国际成人教育发展委员会提案中,第一次比较明确地论述了终身教育概念。之后,他又在《终身教育展望》一文中提出了“任何阶段所有人都能得到学习机会”的观点。联合国教科文组织吸纳了 Libraries have emerged with the abundance of knowledge and have been playing the role of knowledge gathering and storage for thousands of years. With the increase of knowledge in the process of human society, the development function of knowledge is revealed in the library, and more and more attention has been paid to it. However, while emphasizing its knowledge function, we should not neglect its educational function. For this reason, some people of insight think that libraries should become the second class of citizen’s life-long education. The so-called lifelong education, refers to the sum of life education. The term “lifelong education” first appeared in Britain in 1919, widely found in educational literature after World War II. In 1965, the director of the Bureau of Adult Education of UNESCO and the French expert on adult education, Lange Lang, first presented the concept of lifelong education to the proposal of the International Commission for Adult Education Development. Later, in his article “Lifelong Education Outlook,” he put forward the idea that “everyone can learn opportunities at any stage”. UNESCO has absorbed