University library services in social networks during the pandemic

Social networks that help people establish social relationships with each other over the changing and evolving time have started to take active roles in every aspect of our lives for a number of reasons. One of these areas has been university libraries. Social networks became more important to the libraries by announcing pandemic by the World Health Organization on March 11, 2020. In this context, it is intended to determine how active university libraries are in social networks during the pandemic period, what they use for, whether there is a change in shared content with pandemic. In the scope of the research, the Twitter accounts of the libraries of three state and three foundation universities from Turkey which were listed in the QS World University Ranking 2021 list in the top 1000, were evaluated by content analysis method. The MAXQDA program has been used to encode shared posts. These codes are evaluated by categorizing them. According to the research results, a positive change was found in the use of pandemic and social networks of universities. In general, it has been concluded that posts shared on Twitter during the pandemic period are mostly in the category of communication with announcements, online trainings and users, but the use of libraries differ. On the other hand, it has been determined that the post posts related to the pandemic theme are proportionally low. It has also been found that the time zones that all libraries share correspond to the most common hours of operation, but the time, day, and month-to-month sharing differs from the pandemic period and before.