Petições públicas online sobre bibliotecas e bibliotecários

The Internet has provided a series of advances in different fields of knowledge and of performance, moreover related with the citizenship and political engagement. It is increasingly simple to individuals create and share content, in addition to being able to manifest and ask for their rights. After the influence of social media as Facebook and Twitter, that were decisive in events like Arab Spring (Egypt), Occupy Wall Street (United States) and Vem Pra Rua (Brasil), the online public petitions has echoed and increased the number of signatures in the last ten years. Within this context, the purpose of this article is to analyze public online petitions about libraries and librarians. Two well-knows platforms were selected in Brazil: Change and Peticoes Publicas Brasil. Data were collected from the keywords “library” and “librarian” in April 2017, without specifying the time limit for analysis. A total of 91 petitions were analyzed in order to identify the coverage, the typology of libraries, the professional issues and the opportunities and threats. The public and school libraries were the ones that motivated the largest number of petitions, although those of a professional nature were the ones that received the most signatures. Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Santa Catarina were the states that had the most documents with the most different needs. Finally, future research possibilities that verify the low expressiveness of the political engagement related to these themes, and the necessary improvements in the platforms to make this type of manifestation legally accepted, were highlighted.