The Global Response to COVID-19: Keeping the Community Connected with Library Resources and Services: This Director’s Brief aims to provide an examination of how libraries have adapted their resources to serve quarantined populations during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. This brief begins by exploring how COVID-19 has affected the world, and then follows with an exploration of its impact on library users. The Hyperlinked Library model provides a framework to examine the COVID-19 response of public, academic, and government libraries. Care was taken to examine library services both within the US and abroad — a global overview ensures that a greater variety of approaches can be considered for future response efforts. This brief concludes with an outline of the affordances and negative issues resulting from the global library response, and suggests approaches for successful future implementation.

Sammantha Garcia lives in Oakland, CA and works at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She holds a BA in English literature from UC Berkeley and is currently pursuing her MLIS at San Jose State University.