University libraries facing the COVID-19 pandemic: better prepared than the university that hosts them?

By José Antonio Quinteiro Goris |  The state of alarm derived from the COVID-19 pandemic was a trauma for most Latin American and Caribbean universities, particularly regarding the continuity of the teaching-learning processes.

Although the digital transformation is an evolutionary process that our universities have been undertaking for at least 20 years, the inertia of the institutions themselves, the preponderance of contents over methods and the procedural rigidity that characterizes them, has meant that information and communication technologies (ICTs) have not always reached their full potential of use.

Unlike the host institution that houses them, university libraries knew how to appropriate the technologies and began their transition at the beginning of the 1990s, driven, it must be said, by a world that was changing from print to digital for reasons of cost and portability. In general terms, we can say that Latin American libraries left behind, between 1998 and 2005, their acquisitions of periodicals on paper, and began to do so digitally through individual or consortial subscriptions.

Despite the above, university libraries in the region have not yet reached a stage of development that would allow them to be called digital libraries in the strict sense of the word, being on average somewhere closer to the configuration of a hybrid library than a fully digitized one. It is also true that the periodicals that make up their collections are acquired and made available to users in electronic format, while the electronic book – for reasons of cost, diversity of formats, and limited availability of titles in Spanish – still has a low presence in the holdings of our university libraries, particularly in the areas of the Social Sciences. In spite of this, an increasing percentage of the total budget is being allocated to the acquisition of electronic books. In this sense, and apart from the acquisitions made in the commercial circuit, university libraries also process and keep electronic books that are created within the institution itself in digital format (open access institutional repositories), without a printed counterpart, ensuring the custody of the living memory of the university (theses, teaching materials, research products, institutional journals, etc.) of great value for the university community, and third parties, who access them in an unrestricted way (open access) and free of charge. Making this scientific and cultural information produced by the university available as if it were another public asset constitutes a fair solution to be accountable to society for research financed with public funds.

Similarly, and with some exceptions, Latin American and Caribbean university libraries have long had their catalogs – that intermediary tool between collections and users – entirely online (OPAC) in order to identify, locate and check the real-time availability of any document (book, magazine, video, etc.), download it if digitized, and process reservations and loan applications online.

While it is true that the actions of libraries, including university libraries, traditionally focus on face-to-face contact with the communities they serve, it is equally true that ICTs allowed them to transcend the physical limits of their spaces in terms of scope, but also as a remote provider of their services. This fact is palpable in a survey (2020) that had a response rate of 39%, applied among 326 libraries belonging to 131 Argentine universities in times of pandemic: 80% of the staff worked remotely without major difficulties, enabling students to maintain access to 90% of their databases; meanwhile, only 12% said that the pandemic brought about minor modifications in their tasks or daily work routines.

These figures cannot be compared with the difficulties experienced in the pedagogical field, where the changes that have occurred in the educational model have not yet found the appropriate adaptation among stockholders involved.

Therefore, the way in which university libraries have incorporated and taken advantage of the benefits of digitization deserves due recognition, particularly for the invaluable assistance they provide to the teaching-learning process in the current remote teaching emergency. As indicated in the above-mentioned survey, there is now “a much closer link between teachers, researchers and librarians” (34% of those surveyed).

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Note: 2021 was declared the Ibero-American Year of Libraries at the XX Ibero-American Conference of Ministers of Culture of Ibero-America, held in 2019