Services in Central Region

The review was prepared by Irina Petrovna Tikunova, Head of the Department of Scientific and Methodological Activities - Head of the Center for Researching the Problems of Library Development in the Information Society of the RSL. "We can work in emergency conditions" From the speech of Z. V. Chalova, Director Central city public library named after V.V. Mayakovsky (city of Saint Petersburg) Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash Infection from COVID-19, which broke out in the Chinese city of Wuhan at the end of 2019, has spread to many countries around the world, including Russia. In order to prevent the spread of coronavirus on the territory of the Russian Federation, in March 2020, state authorities decided to close federal, regional and municipal cultural institutions for visiting. Libraries were among these institutions. Analysis of the information posted on the websites of federal and central regional libraries showed that, having stopped accepting users in their premises, these libraries continued to serve remotely, through their Services in Central Region  official websites, social network accounts, and Internet platform channels. So, the Russian State Library, in order to ensure maximum access of the population to its own information resources and the National Electronic Library, became a member of the pilot project of the Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications of the Russian Federation, within the framework of which from April 1 to July 1, 2020, their sites remain open to those who do not have the ability to pay for home internet. It should be noted that libraries began to introduce various forms of remote services at the end of the 20th century. The degree of digitalization of each specific library depended both on resource capabilities (finance, trained personnel, technological and technical base) and on the level of socio-economic, technological and cultural development of the region. The analysis of the websites made it possible to identify several areas of remote work, which, with varying degrees of activity, are carried out by federal and central regional libraries: The range of electronic resources of the modern library is wide enough. All federal and regional libraries have electronic catalogs for their own funds, the central libraries of 44 constituent entities of Russia place on their websites consolidated catalogs reflecting the funds of public libraries of their territories. Most libraries create publicly available bibliographic, abstract and factual databases on specific topics, personalities, and branches of knowledge. All federal and regional libraries are digitizing their own funds, forming electronic libraries or separate digital collections. During the pandemic, the availability of these resources was determined by libraries in different ways: some libraries provided registered readers with the right to remote access to all documents from their own electronic library, while others strictly observed copyright. Users of the "Gosuslugi" portal received the right to free access to the documents of the NEB. All federal and many regional libraries offered their registered readers access to licensed information resources of other aggregators and providers that opened their “information bins” during the coronavirus infection, including the databases “Liters”, “Doe”, “BiblioRossika”, EBSCO , ProQuest and others. Thus, the list of open information resources offered by the RSL to its readers includes more than 35 databases. Without exception, all libraries offered their users lists or reviews of legitimate public and free Internet resources, including: NEL, scientific electronic libraries eLIBRARY.RU and CyberLeninka, Fundamental electronic library "Russian Literature and Folklore", portal "Culture. RF ”and others, including resources of other federal and regional libraries. To expand the circle of their users during the period of forced closure, some libraries simplified the procedure for registering with the library, such as, for example, the Russian State Library for Youth, which provided a full package of online services to those who filled out and sent a special questionnaire posted on the library's website (provided the correctness and reliability of the data obtained, checked by the moderator), and some libraries, for example, the RSL and the Central City Public Library named after V.V. Mayakovsky (city of St. Petersburg) provided the opportunity to receive library cards online after registering in the library. https://jiji.ug/central-region/services