European Libraries and Their Virtual Users: How the Pandemic Affected Digital Production and Participation

In the present article, we analyse the digital activity and behaviour of the European National Libraries and of their users on the most important social media, namely Facebook and Instagram, in a time window that covers the period before and during the Covid-19 pandemic. This activity was carried out within the framework of the Horizon 2020 European inDICEs project1 which aims to support libraries, museums and archives in developing digital strategies to experiment with engagement strategies driven by digital collections. The project is developing an Open Observatory, where GLAM professionals as well as creative industries, policy makers and researchers can find and analyse data on digital heritage accessibility and reuse, and explore case studies on novel value chains. In the article we present a specific use case based on National Libraries, which in the cultural heritage sector are among the most active institutions in digital services policies. Our aim is to understand how the Covid 19 pandemic has impacted the sector. After monitoring the National Libraries quantitative and qualitative level of digital activity in correlation with the forced wave of digitization led by the social-distancing policies, we have given a synthetic overview of the main findings, which regard, on one hand, a significant increase in online activities and followers of the social media pages in correspondence to the lockdown periods;on the other hand, we have observed passive participation of their users, with whom the institutions have shown they are unable to establish an active relationship, missing the chance to exploit the possibilities that the digital platforms can offer in terms of co-creation processes, digital community empowerment, development of new soft skills and shared knowledge resources. © 2022 Copyright for this paper by its authors.

Being a transnational researcher and a mother amid the COVID-19 crisis

The article focuses on the author’s experience as a transnational researcher during the early months of the COVID-19 outbreak (January–April 2020), and discusses the possibilities and impossibilities of the COVID-19 pandemic for mothers who are transnational researchers. The sociological approach of institutional ethnography is utilised to analyse entries from the author’s diary, articles and videos from mass media, posts on social media, and institutional texts (for example, regulations, policies). The disjunctures between the different versions of reality (the author’s experiential perspective versus the ruling perspectives of the various institutions that framed the author’s experience at different stages) are discussed from the author’s standpoint as an international researcher, a woman and a single mother. © 2022 Policy Press. All rights reserved.