Shandong University, one of the oldest and prestigious universities in China, has been working hard to help transform the province's cultural advantages into economic development.

The university's Institute for Cultural Industries has been engaging in the construction work of material libraries and public service platform themed "animation project of Qilu culture", which is designed to facilitate effective match-making between local cultural creative projects or cultural capitals and first-rate technical teams, production teams and marketing teams from home and abroad, so as to promote the on-stop solution for creative ideas, product-development and marketing.

Till date, the institute has completed the construction of 20 material libraries and generated nine animation plans.

Qilu refers to the kingdoms of the Qi and Lu, in what is now Shandong, before the founding of the Qin Dynasty (221-207 BC). It is also used sometimes to refer to Shandong province, one of the birthplaces of Chinese culture and civilization.

Team from Shandong University carries out folk custom research in rural areas of Shandong province. [Photo/sdu.edu.cn]

"Shandong is a province with abundant cultural resources and it aims to build itself into a province with strong cultural competitiveness. But its efforts at the transformation of creativity into industry has been insufficient," said Shao Minghua, director of School of History and Culture at Shandong University.

Shao introduced that she is also engaging in a cultural creative product research and development project, for which the initial work has been completed, including the cultural resource excavation and creative project transformation.

"We are now looking for cooperative enterprises to turn the present outline into a practical reality. I hope this project will become an incubator for cultural creative products," said Shao.