Abstract
The Covid-19 pandemic has greatly affected higher education and cultural sector, including libraries. Most of the libraries in Mongolia were physically closed for patrons. Librarians were suddenly tasked moving from in-person service into online and the Covid-19 pandemic affects policies, strategies, activities, behavior itself and the library’s future development strategy was not considering the effect of Covid-19. The aim of this paper is to explore how Mongolian libraries satisfy the need of their patrons in unexpected situation, such as Covid-19-induced transition to adapt to keep afloat, to identify the main issues that have arisen and make recommendations for the betterment of libraries’ role in such situations. To be more specific, we address the following research questions: To what extend Covid-19 affected library daily activities? Will the library service styles, perspectives, strategies, patrons’, and librarian’ attitudes change in the future? To address the research issues a quantitative and qualitative content analysis was used on a dataset created from a questionnaire survey and interviews from librarians and patrons. The aim was to find out whether libraries can meet patrons’ needs and if the staff is fully paid. Besides, the analysis covered such criteria as printed and e-book usage, internal and external online databases, other library services usage during the pandemic period, and positive and negative impact of Covid-19. The results were then compared to the indicators of the pre-Covid-19 period.
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