Model Municipal Libraries: Scientific and Methodological Support in the Electronic Environment

Scientific and methodological activities are in the focus of attention of Russian library specialists. At professional events and in scientific and practical publications the issues of the influence of digital technologies on the content and tasks of methodological work, as well as the mastering of new knowledge and skills by methodologists are raised. The problems of ethics of interaction with the target audience in remote form, the content of virtual representations of methodological services and the quality of information presented in them are discussed. In 2024 specialists of the Russian State Library analyzed the official websites of 85 central regional libraries. The purpose of this work is to study the experience of scientific and methodological support in the electronic environment of the national project “Culture” in terms of creating model municipal libraries (federal project “Cultural Environment”). The study is the first characteristic of methodological resources created over the years of the project implementation and placed in the electronic environment, assessing their diversity, accessibility, informativeness, and practicality for use by specialists involved in the modernization of municipal libraries.

The study showed that all central regional libraries reflect their methodological participation in the project on their websites, but use different approaches. More than half of the libraries (66%) have created special methodological web-presentations, where information about the region’s participation in the project is concentrated. Other libraries (34%) publish this information in different structural elements of the site, mainly in sections where news, documents and methodological materials are presented. It was found that the number of libraries posting methodological resources on the subject of the national project is relatively low: official documents of federal and regional levels are presented on the websites of 53% of libraries, industrial and practical — 30% of libraries, educational and methodological and analytical materials in isolated cases. Shortcomings in the presentation of methodological resources in the electronic environment were revealed: lack of clear control over the relevance of the content, placement of visual material of low quality, poor filling of thematic sections, inaccuracies in the designation of resources, etc. Not all central regional libraries widely use the possibilities of the electronic environment for sharing experience and informing about their methodological activities. There is a need for further development of the content of the Internet representations of methodological services, as well as improvement of methodologists’ competences related to the ability to work with large data sets, to structure, systematize and visualize information, to determine the degree of its relevance.

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