Styliani Vazaiou is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Archival, Library and Information Systems of the University of West Attica. She has a master’s degree (MSc) in the Management of Cultural Heritage and New Technologies from the Department of Archival, Librarianship and Museology of the Ionian University (Grade 8.8, excellent). She also has a B.A. (Hon) from the Department of Librarianship and Information Systems of the TEI of Athens (2009) and another B.A. (Hon) from the Department of Archival, Librarianship and Museology of the Ionian University (8.58 excellent) (2018).
She is a member of the Union of Greek Librarians and Information Scientists and the Hellenic Archival Society. Her current research interests focus on library services, digital services, digital acceleration, redefining libraries in the post-covid era, metadata as well as librarianship and information in light of the role of libraries in the information and knowledge society. Since 2013, she has been working as an archivist at the Historical Archives of the Piraeus Bank Group Cultural Foundation. In the context of a remunerative scholarship for PhD Candidates for the provision of auxiliary teaching work, she participates from 2023 in the teaching of the workshop of the course “Metadata”.
Indicative Title of Doctoral Research:
The emerging role of libraries in the new context of technology in the post-covid era: redefining libraries.
Brief Summary of Research:
The covid-19 pandemic brought many social, economic and political changes worldwide with a direct impact on all productive sectors. In the field of research and education, libraries suspend their operations or are placed in restrictive measures for a long period. Despite their suspension, libraries have continued to offer services from the start of the pandemic to today, highlighting new ways and methods to support research and teaching work under unprecedented conditions. Libraries used new technologies and implemented new models of virtual services in order to improve internal communication and continue to provide services to their users remotely. Several of the recently adopted technologies have proven to be highly effective and their use is set to continue beyond the duration of the pandemic. In this PhD thesis, the evolution of digital services in Greek libraries will be studied given the restrictions during covid-19 as well as if the services evolved further for research and education, through digital acceleration. The purpose of the study is to investigate how the digital services of Greek libraries are finally shaped in the post-covid era and how these services lead to the creation of a new definition of the concept of the library, through the study of their services. So research questions arise as to whether the provision of digital services has increased because of covid, whether library services have reverted to pre-covid methods, whether librarians’ perceptions have not changed with covid and whether there has been a digital acceleration in library services as a consequence of covid. Despite the challenges facing libraries of all types during the COVID-19 pandemic, new practices and innovative ways to approach services have emerged. The research methodology will be analyzed in two sections. 1. Research of academic libraries regarding their services by studying websites and interviews and 2. Perceptions, psychometric characteristics of employees.