Mediations of digital collections in the UTFPR libraries: a case study of the Covid-19 pandemic period

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic caused the services offered by information equipment to be reconfigured and migrated to the digital environment, leading to a change in both the attitude of the professionals involved and the users. Thus, the article aims to investigate the mediation actions of digital collections with librarians at the Federal University of Technology - Paraná (UTFPR) during the period of social isolation caused by the pandemic. The research adopts a single case study as a research method by collecting information through a questionnaire sent to all UTFPR librarians in order to qualitatively identify the actions developed within the scope of the mediation of digital collections. As a result of the research, it was identified that with the closure of the physical space of libraries there was a large flow of activities carried out by librarians, even remotely. It identifies 29 activities within the scope of the mediation of digital collections and finds that despite the restrictions on access to the physical collection of libraries, students, professors and other researchers had the necessary information available for the development of their teaching, research and extension activities through digital collections of the institution and the performance of the mediators. It concludes that the activities are sometimes framed as implicit and sometimes explicit mediation actions, with the aim of providing users with access to digital collections and being able to appropriate the information.