Libraries and COVID-19: Opportunities for innovation

The initial measures to curb the spread of the virus resulted in far-reaching institutional closures. Multiple libraries across the globe closed, but this did not mean that they stopped serving their patrons – in reality, it meant that they had to redefine what services could be delivered online in addition to those that were already there. The library sector had experience from previous disasters, when people flocked in large numbers to libraries for shelter and support. Now, the challenge was to deal with the opposite – supporting patrons who were nowhere near the physical space of the library. At a time when libraries were expanding the variety of activities that help to define them as third places, suddenly the physical dimension of library use vanished. At this stage, a huge impact on libraries was that they started redefining the services they provided. For those institutions already on the path of digital transformation, the pandemic brought an additional set of considerations. For many libraries not yet working on digital transformation strategies, the pandemic was what pushed them onto that path (Garcia-Febo, 2021). The results of this process remain to be seen and understood. If we want to look into the evidence of what topics dominated professional thinking at this time, a helpful set of documents is the initial recommendations of the major library associations across the globe. Kosciejew (2020) offers an informative initial analysis of these plans and Figure 1 illustrates the timeline of their appearance.