What We Need Is a Knowledge Management Perspective

One of the most cited articles in College & Research Libraries over the last ten years has been Charles Townley’s “Knowledge Management and Academic Libraries,” which was published back in January 2001. I found this out recently when we peer-reviewed and accepted the forthcoming article “A Citation Analysis of College & Research Libraries: Comparing Yahoo, Google, Google Scholar, and ISI World of Knowledge with Implications for Promotion and Tenure” by Charles Martell. Martell’s article provides an interesting look at the use of articles from our journal, including a table of the top ten most cited C&RL articles in the last ten years. If you want to read Martell’s forthcoming article, you can. Like most journals we have a backlog of accepted articles waiting for formal publication. Martell’s article was accepted in December 2008, but it will not be formally published in C&RL until July 2009 or later. However, you do not have to wait. You can find it right now in its final manuscript form by going to our new pre-publication service at the College & Research Libraries Web site. This service makes C&RL manuscripts available “open access” within days after acceptance. I had not read Townley’s article on knowledge management before Martell alerted me to it. I would have benefited from reading it sooner. (Remember the value of literature reviews.) I stumbled onto the idea of knowledge management all on my own some years ago as I tried to make sense of the changing nature of collection development work in academic libraries. It seemed to me then, and it seems even more so today, that academic librarians need to extend the range of their responsibilities and expertise well beyond the traditional, almost exclusive, focus on collecting and servicing the formally published scholarly literature. It is true that our special collections librarians and archivist have paid att ention to more unique and ephemeral material, but there is so much more “explicit” and even more “tacit” knowledge coming from our faculty and students that escapes our attention. The field of knowledge management provides a useful perspective and tools for addressing this broader range of librarian responsibility. With the rapid development of digital information technology and the Internet, an individual’s or group’s ability to create and disseminate information in an un-mediated manner, to self-publish, has exploded. One of the best descriptions I have read about this more democratic and participatory information environment and how it filled the Internet with an extraordinary amount and range of content in just one decade is Kevin Kelly’s “We Are the Web” (Wired magazine, August 2005). The ability to create and share information and knowledge is literally at our finger tips. Do an inventory or even a cursory survey of the types and amount of useful, sharable digital information being generated by faculty, students, and staff at your university or college, and I can wager you will be impressed by the variety, amount, and casual approach to storage and preservation of this content.