An analysis of the content provided by public libraries on social networks during COVID-19 pandemic

The spread of Corona and the closure of public libraries caused the activities of libraries to continue in the virtual space and librarians to seek to create content for their libraries. The library staff started providing content for their websites, weblogs and social media. The purpose of this research is to analyze the online content created by the librarians of public libraries affiliated with the Iran Public Libraries Foundation during the COVID-19 pandemic on Instagram in order to gain knowledge about their experiences.

The current research is descriptive and applied and was carried out using the documentary method, in which the pages of Iranian public libraries on Instagram were carefuly watched for their contents and topics. The research population included 2700 branched of public libraries affiliated to the Iran Public Libraries Foundation, from which a sample of 336 libraries was selected using Morganʼs table. The sample was categorized in a way to include representatives from 31 provinces. The data about posts, followers and subject tags was extracted and entered into the Excel software. For this purpose, the posts were separated according to the publication date of each post (before the COVID-19 pandemic, during the closure of libraries during the COVID-19 pandemic, and after the COVID-19 pandemic). In order to test the research hypotheses, the Pearson correlation coefficient and regression tests were used.

The results showed that the contents provided by the librarians on the official pages of Iranian public libraries mostly refer to four thematic classes: library workshops, training courses, announcements of the upcoming cultural-literary events, and news on calendar events. In case of the workshops, Tehran province had the highest number of posts (with 804 posts) and Qom province had the lowest number of posts (with 98 posts). For training courses, Tehran province showed the highest number of posts with 75 posts and Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari province showed the lowest number with 3 posts. In the case of announcements of cultural-literary events, Tehran province had the greatest number of posts with 112 posts, while the lowest number of posts belonged to East Azarbaijan province. In the case of calendar events, Tehran province has the highest number of posts with 121 posts, while Kurdistan province and Kahegiluyeh and Boyer Ahmad province had the lowest number with 11 posts. The results for Spearman test revealed a significant correlation between the degree and the number of followers, and the number of posts. There was also a significant relationship between the degree of library and the time lapse between the published posts.

Originality/value:

 The conditions of Corona and quarantine during the pandemic forced the librarians of public libraries to continue their activities and services such as lending, reference services, events on social networking platforms, particularly Instagram. The findings of the current research showed that smaller libraries have offered more and more diverse content on Instagram. It seems that there is a closer connection between the local communities and the librarians of smaller libraries, and the audience of these libraries is more interested in following their library pages, and this in turn can lead to more content and news related to libraries. The experience of online content creation during the Corona pandemic can be used to expand the range of offline services of libraries, manage crisis situations and motivate librarians to create content.