Innovation in public university libraries in Brazil: a study on the library system of the federal university of Rio de Janeiro (SIBI UFRJ)

Abstract

The concept of innovation is broadly directed to the creation of new products or services, in studies focused on organizational environments based on an innovation environment, corroborating the mistaken understanding that innovating is creating something purely new. The literature review points to a plural reality, emphasizing that innovation can happen in the form of product or service process improvements. Due to such mass knowledge in the collective imagination, the study of innovation in environments of information units has been challenging, as libraries are organizations with defined tasks and responsibilities and aim to meet the institutional mission: teaching, research and extension promoting the use of its informative potential, offering products and services that meet all types of demand from its users. The century-old Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) is part of the list of the best educational institutions in Brazil and its libraries support this reality through their routine actions. UFRJ libraries seek to promote innovative actions in their daily work, and this fact was evidenced in the period of remote work imposed by the covid-19 pandemic. This work aims to report the perceptions about the innovation practices adopted by the UFRJ libraries in the period from 2020 to February 2022, where their face-to-face activities were suspended, having to adapt through actions that promoted the service to all their users. even if the distance. This is a qualitative-quantitative, explanatory research using theoretical and observational research, using documents, literature review, survey and field research. The universe chosen was that of the UFRJ libraries that make up the Library and Information System (SIBI), using a semi-structured interview through a questionnaire sent by email to the 44 managers of the libraries and 1 manager of the SIBI UFRJ. Such actions were triggered through knowledge sharing, through a management whose focus is knowledge management with a view to the efficiency and effectiveness of the management of the library system. It became evident that it is necessary to create a culture of innovation, so that librarians and library staff can identify innovative actions that aim to optimize the work of a university library, that is, to meet its mission, which is linked to that of UFRJ, support in teaching, research and extension. The visibility of the benefits obtained by the innovative aspects will help other professionals and university libraries in their daily lives, through already established models, enabling the creation and dissemination of knowledge in these information units. The research demonstrated that the study of innovation allied to the culture of innovation in the scope of librarianship and in public university libraries is essential for the act of creating or improving something in the librarianship to become something recurrent.