Croatian public libraries’ activities on facebook during the covid-19 lockdown in the spring of 2020

Abstract

Purpose. The purpose of this paper is to present libraries’ accepting and using the social networking service Facebook as a response to the extraordinary circumstances caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Like most European countries, Croatia went into full lockdown during the COVID-19 outbreak in the spring of 2020. All public services in Croatia, including public libraries, were closed for 38 days, starting on March 19th. Croatian public libraries faced major changes as they had to transform their traditional library services into virtual ones, creating and sharing various digital content on Face-book, often on a daily basis. Approach/methodology/design. This paper is about libraries’ activities on Face-book as a way of serving communities during the lockdown. The presented research is based on the analysis of the posts created on public libraries’ Facebook pages. It was conducted in July of 2020 on 208 Croatian public libraries, i.e. 146 of them that had a Facebook page during the research period. Findings. The research shows that the Croatian public librarians have proved to live up to the challenges of new and unknown situations, demonstrating they can quickly adapt and appropriately use digital technologies. Libraries have been developing new innovative practices, becoming more and more creative. The result was handful of content on Facebook, but also on other social networks, like, workshops for children and adults; streamings of online events, organization of virtual exhibitions and collecting verified reference sources for research and learning. The public response was greater than expected, including following, commenting and sharing digital content created or shared by public libraries. Another impact of the crisis was the accelerated development of new digital library services, like online membership registration and e-books lending. Originality/value. The research is the first overview of the Croatian public libraries’ Facebook activities in extraordinary circumstances caused by lockdown and can encour-age other libraries to implement the best practices presented in this paper.