The Effects of Covid-19 on Libraries of Mongolia

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic has greatly affected higher education and cultural sector, including libraries. The majority 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, behaviors itself and the library’s future development strategy was not taking into account 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 the Covid-19 affected the library daily activities? Do the library service style, perspectives, strategies, patrons and librarian attitudes change in the future? To address the research questions a quantitative and qualitative content analysis approach was used on a dataset created from questionnaire survey and interviews from librarians and patrons. We studied whether the library could response patrons’ needs, the staff is fully paid or not, printed and e-book usage, internal and external online databases, positive and negative impacts of Covid-19 and other library services during pandemic period and compared them to the indicators with pre-Covid-19 period.