Management of the pandemic situation in libraries

The library practice of more than twenty countries, followed during the second phase of the pandemic, was compiled by the staff of National Széchényi Library under the coordination of the Hungarian Library Institute. Earlier, from spring to mid-June 2020, our colleagues regularly reported on the reopening of libraries, with an international overview of the situation. Due to the repeated intensification of the epidemic, yet another analysis has been carried out.

One of the most interesting facts of the analysis is that a large-scale research on the safe handling and disinfection of library documents in the United States began last summer, in collaboration with the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), OCLC and Battelle Laboratory to provide proper answer to the effects of the coronavirus on public collection work. Among other things, the research examined the detectability of the coronavirus pathogen as a function of time in the materials of the five most common library documents. You can read in detail (in Hungarian) about the results of the research and the library practice of the countries included in the compilation on the website of the Hungarian Library Institute.