On 19 May 2020, Rao Quan, Director of the National Library of China (NLC), held a video conference with Ashraf Boroujerdi, Director of the National Library and Archives of the Islamic Republic of Iran (NLAI). They exchanged ideas and shared experiences of both libraries in responding to COVID-19 epidemic.

Rao Quan expressed his sincere greetings to Ashraf Boroujerdi and colleagues in the Iranian library community. He said that the friendly relations between China and Iran had a long history, and exchanges in the field of humanities had a profound historical foundation and broad development prospects. The COVID-19 epidemic had caused a serious impact on the global library community. After several months of exploration and practice of the colleagues in Chinese library community, the libraries had gradually resumed open services, and made certain achievements on fighting against COVID-19 epidemic.

Ashraf Boroujerdi expressed her thanks to Rao Quan for his greetings. She said that the two libraries had close contacts in recent years. As national libraries, both libraries should give full play to the functions of cultural institutions in this special period, extensively carry out online services around the national and social needs for epidemic prevention and anti-epidemic information, and try their best to overcome the impact of the epidemic on meeting the cultural needs of the public.

Rao Quan mainly introduced the practices of the NLC to organize and carry out the construction and service of online information topics. The NLC provided online services by increasing the content of online learning resources and delivering the special reading resources of epidemic prevention and anti-epidemic information. Ashraf Boroujerdi shared the measures taken by the NLAI to provide high-quality resources for readers by strengthening the E-library and digitalization construction.

The two sides also exchanged ideas on the construction of Internet information topics on fighting against COVID-19 epidemic, gradually resuming open services, and so on, and hoped to take this video conference exchange as an opportunity to further expand the all-round cooperation between the two libraries.