Public Libraries in Brazil: Conceptual Review in The Post-Pandemic Era

Abstract

The health crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic affected worldwide communities and public social spaces. Mandatory at-home isolation for 2 years, followed by libraries reopening after demanded security adjustments, changed Brazilian public libraries’ workplace dynamics, which now rely mainly on labor and engagement via social networks. Remarkably, a hybrid quality emerged and became the norm in everyday professional practices, generating a new ethos in the epistemic construction of the field of public librarianship. In this chapter, the authors aim to review the concept of the public library and its workplace dynamics after the changes triggered by a new post-pandemic environment, searching for answers to the following question: Have Brazilian public libraries become more or less inhabited as the result of the pandemic crisis? Applying a social and descriptive approach to examine the idea that bonding relationships with public social spaces contribute to building groups’ and communities’ identity, enhancing their history, relations, and memory, the authors debate if public libraries are anthropological inhabited places or non-places, proposing a perspective that connects the public library to the development of the individual and helps to understand space-time appropriation, focusing on identity construction. Exploring this framework, the authors identify the need to review the concept of the public library to represent its contemporaneous aspects of time, space, and collectivity and to include the many creative, affective, and symbolic dimensions embodied by all the individuals the library serves, based on the new experiences driven by disuse or resumption of use due to the pandemic.

Citation

Achilles, D., Oliveira, R., Sabbag, D. and Oddone, N. (2024), "Public Libraries in Brazil: Conceptual Review in The Post-Pandemic Era", Irvin, V. and Mehra, B. (Ed.) Reading Workplace Dynamics: A Post-Pandemic Professional Ethos in Public Libraries (Advances in Librarianship, Vol. 55), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 13-25. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0065-283020240000055002