The Shanghai Children's Library, established in 1941 as the Shanghai Private Library for Children, was renamed as "shanghai Children's Library" in 1952, by the Shanghai culture Bureau. In fhe June of 1980, our state Honorary Chairman, Madame Song Qing-ling, inscribed its official name with her autograph. The library was evaluated "the First - Class Library"in the country by the State Ministry of Culture in 1995.

The library is situated at 962 Nanjing Road(west) in the downtown area of Shanghai. It covers an area of 4,200 square meters,and it is composed of a main building in Euro-Amedcan style and its side building in modem style,both of which are surrounded by the trees and flowers of all shapes and colours.

There are about twenty service windows in the library. In the main building there are a literature room, an English room, a periodical room, a popular-sience room, a self-study room, an art-book room, a digital library, an open-shelf reading room and a multi-functional hall. In the side building there are the Children's Knowledge Garden and the computer education centre. The Children's Knowledge Garden includes a toy-city, a minitheatre and a do-it-yourself room. The computer education centre provides computer management system,education system,multi-media guiding system and electronic reading room.

There are more than 450 thousand books in the library, among which there are the early-stage picture books for children, various kinds of magazines and periodicals, as well as a lot of representative works of world-widefamous writers.The library has become the source-centre of books for children in Shanghai.

The aim of the library is "Readers First, Service first", in order to train the children to be good citizens with "Four-Have" qualities, all the librarians are always ready to serve the young readers wholeheartedly. The library offers all kinds of services,such as book-sending,group-borrowing, book-reserving, tele-resuming, and the library has also set-up more than twenty mobile libraries outside. The computer network system, completed in August, 1998, has opened "Children's information Harbor"on the Shanghai Hot-line and been connected to internet. The main net-pages provide the complete catalogues of books and a vast amount of information of the library for all the readers.

The library has been sponsodng and organizing a great number of reading activies, such as brain contesting,pop-science lecturing, essay collecting, poetry composing and picture painting. All these activities help the youth a lot to develop and train their personal characters, Having established close relations with other children's libraries in all districts of Shanghai, even with those,outside of Shanghai, the library is guiding their reading activities, editing the journal of "Children's Library" and,organizing relevant research work. Since 1957. the library has also been keeping friendly communications and cultural exchanges with many other countries and districts in the world.