Le biblioteche italiane durante la pandemia COVID-19: un'indagine sui servizi

Giannini S, Lombardi S, Molino A

COVID-19  Library management  Library services  Digital libraries 

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, from mid-February, libraries in Italy started to close to the public. In a short time, librarians had to implement different solutions to guarantee remote services and support to the users. In our study, we aim to outline how Italian libraries are responding to the challenges posed by this extraordinary situation. Moreover, we attempt to determine how librarians foresee their role after the emergency and to what extent exceptional means of service provision would become standards in the future. We proposed to the community of Italian librarians a questionnaire structured in thirteen sections, each corresponding to a specific aspect of our investigation. We disseminated it extensively to reach the widest audience possible. In eleven days, we collected 1134 anonymous responses from different types of libraries. Results demonstrated that librarians adapted quite fast to the new conditions with a medium degree of difficulty in maintaining the services active. We generally register an evident prevalence of the digital mean of provision. Even though the communication with the users is only virtual, their awareness of library presence seems to remain steady, if not increased. Most librarians believe that such a situation would affect the world of libraries significantly, being digital or not, after the pandemic. In our work, we adopted a traditional instrument for data collection to propose a full-scale investigation aimed at examining the whole range of activities of all library typologies in Italy in an outstanding time of contemporary history.

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