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First International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies: from Theory to Applications – ICTTA’04. April 19-23, 2004, Omayyad Palace, Damascus, Syria :Library and Information Professionals and Knowledge Management Applications :Prepared by:Nagat William Girgis    |
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First International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies: from Theory to Applications – ICTTA’04. April 19-23, 2004, Omayyad Palace, Damascus, Syria
The Title of the paper:
Library and Information Professionals and Knowledge Management Applications
______________________________________________________________________
Prepared by:
Head of Computerized Documentation Section
Documentation and Information Center
National Center for Research,
P.O. Box 2404, Khartoum, Sudan
E-mails: nagatwilli@hotmail.com
Head of Computerized Documentation Section
Documentation and Information Center
National Center for Research,
P.O. Box 2404, Khartoum, Sudan
E-mails: nagatwilli@hotmail.com
Fax: 00-249-183-765885
Abstract:
Global competition, the ever-increasing pace of change and the continuous onslaught of new challenges in library services and information resources are placing substantial pressures on all types of libraries. To establish long-term existence advantages from an information services and Knowledge Management (KM) point of view, especially in research centers, it is no longer sufficient for a library to depend solely on having efficient access to internal and external information resources. It has now become a library requirement of efficiently exploit what the librarians and information professionals actually know – not only what the library owns. More and more organizations are now implementing knowledge management strategies as a solid basis on which to build competitive strength and a sustainable growth pattern as part of their overall work strategies[1]. Knowledge Management is a methodology for capturing, optimizing, delivering and maintaining a collection of information that provides guidance or action, and is of value to the organization. When the information professional has access to knowledge, they can quickly assist users with problems and inquiries[2]. As a result Knowledge Management has become an essential practice within today's libraries and information centers. When combined with Knowledge Management, the libraries and information centers are able to improve efficiencies, increase satisfaction, and reduce the cost of service. This paper is an attempt to explains:
1. Introduction
Finding information is easy. It is not even a matter of finding the right information anymore. There is a lot of that available. The real problem is helping people find the best information from the most appropriate source for their given problem. This is where the role of the information professional comes in. People are becoming reasonably adept at finding their own information. The Internet as well as fee-based information services has made it easy to find tons and tons of information. But that is the problem. The main role of information professional is to know the needs of their client base and providing services to meet those needs. The role of information professional is to take all of this information and deliver it in a way that allows the recipient to quickly, easily and efficiently gets the knowledge they need from the information.
Due to the information explosion, ‘creation’ of Knowledge Management was a necessity, simply to allow individuals or institutions to manage the knowledge acquired. This process is of vital importance especially in the researches field[3].
2. Knowledge Hierarchy
A further dimension considers the premise that knowledge can be organized into a hierarchy. Several authors draw distinctions between data, information, and knowledge:
2.1. Data: Facts, images, or sounds (+ interpretation + meaning =)
2.2. Information: Formatted, filtered, and summarized data (+ action + application =)
2.3. Knowledge: Instinct, ideas, rules, and procedures that guide actions and decisions[4].
Knowledge has two basic definitions of interest. The first pertains to a defined body of information. Depending on the definition, the body of information might consist of facts, opinions, ideas, theories, principles, and models (or other frameworks). Clearly, other categories are possible, too. Subject matter (e.g., chemistry, mathematics, etc) is just one possibility[5].
Knowledge is commonly distinguished from data and information. Data represent observations or facts out of context, and therefore not directly meaningful. Information results from placing data within some meaningful context, often in the form of a message. Knowledge is that which we come to believe and value based on the meaningfully organized accumulation of information (messages) through experience, communication or inference. Knowledge can be viewed both as a thing to be stored and manipulated and as a process of simultaneously knowing and acting - that is, applying expertise[6]. As a practical matter, organizations need to manage knowledge both as object and process.
Knowledge can be tacit or explicit. Tacit knowledge is subconsciously understood and applied, difficult to articulate, developed from direct experience and action, and usually shared through highly interactive conversation, story-telling and shared experience. Explicit knowledge, in contrast, can be more precisely and formally articulated. Therefore, although more abstract, it can be more easily codified, documented, transferred or shared. Explicit knowledge is playing an increasingly large role in organizations, and it is considered by some to be the most important factor of production in the knowledge economy. Imagine an organization without procedure manuals, product literature, or computer software[7].
3. Information Technology Infrastructure[8]:
In order to facilitate sharing of knowledge, IT infrastructure must be in place. In order to be applied, knowledge and expertise must be readily accessible, understandable, and retrievable. Tobin[8] suggests building an IT knowledge network with the following components:
· Knowledge repository, most commonly a database
· Directory of knowledge sources
· Directory of learning resources
· Groupware
4. Knowledge repositories[9]
Several authors have proposed definitions for knowledge repositories:
· A Knowledge repository organize, and makes available to all employees basic information on the company’s organization, products, services, customers, and business processes
· A knowledge repository in an on-line, computer-based storehouse of expertise, knowledge, experience, and documentation about a particular domain of expertise. In creating a knowledge repository, knowledge is collected, summarized, and integrated across sources.
5. Knowledge Management:
“ Is the process through which organizations generate value for their intellectual and knowledge-base assets. Most often, generating value from such assets involves sharing them among employees, departments and even with other companies in an effort to devise best practices.”
So, there is no specific definition for knowledge management. Its purpose is to improve the performance of organizations, libraries or institutions. In the case of Documentation and Information Center, its purpose is to help researchers to obtain their information needs in their fields of interest.
One aspect of KM is human interaction, which may be from a professional to another in the same field or in different fields, or may also be through human interaction with a librarian. According to Butler[12], there are consistently three categories of knowledge within an institution: internal knowledge, customer knowledge, and market knowledge. If the institution or company knows that knowledge becomes valuable if it is used and re-used enhanced and learned from in order to create new knowledge.
In these days, knowledge management is receiving attention all over the world. This globalization aspect is reflected in this special issue as the contributions were collected by two guest editors living on the opposite sides of the world: two researchers were connected via Internet from different country. As author mentioned that: my friend in Spain and myself in Australia. Being connected only by the global communication system e-mail, we worked on providing a good overview of the field and on digging more deeply into a few selected areas. In the National Center for Research most of our work based on information and knowledge, so we need to manage the knowledge to be available upon request, we need knowledge management for the following reasons:
In brief, knowledge and information have become the medium in which business/researches problems occur. As a result, managing knowledge represents the primary opportunity for achieving substantial savings, significant improvements in human performance, and competitive advantage[13].
7. Knowledge management: a cross-disciplinary domain[14]
Knowledge management draws from a wide range of disciplines and technologies.
Knowledge Management will allows:
Prior Knowledge Management application in the library and information Centers, the following important tasks will be seriously taken into considerations:
Best Practices - Sharing prior work and experiences using technology to archive written work in repositories. Also creating opportunities to capture tacit knowledge - this may require collaborative environments to help share that experience that is so hard to capture.
Collaboration - Technology is permitting people to easily share ideas, work together, brainstorm, collaborate. People just need to be educated that the technology is available and easy to use.
Culture - How do you get people to share and use knowledge instinctively? How to overcome the hoarding, and trust issues. These issues can mean the difference between success and failure.
Filtering, Notifying, & Collabration - On-going additions to institutes wide databases and document management is particularly difficult to manage. End users will grow frustrated without the ability to learn about additions that could be of interest to them, helpful in their work. But, they don't want to have to hunt for the information. They want it delivered to them. These tools are designed with that in mind.
Knowledge Management - Information or data management with the additional practice of capturing the tacit experience of the individual to be shared, used and built upon by the organization leading to increased productivity.
Tacit Knowledge - Innovation, creation of new knowledge often comes from collaboration and interaction with experts. These are some of the many ways to create a culture where there is greater collaboration, teamwork and sharing of ideas.
Value - Knowledge is the key differentiator between competing companies today. That knowledge, or intellectual capital, can be very difficult to measure. You'll want an inventory before and after initiating a KM project for evaluation purposes and to determine what projects to take on to maximize intellectual capital down the road.
9. Librarians’ role in Knowledge Management:
Librarians play a major role in transforming data into information, and information into knowledge management. They accomplish this through a number of steps such as acquiring, organizing and indexing information, in addition to helping the searchers in evaluating and critically appraising the information retrieved and gathered.
“Library and information professionals have an important role to play in Knowledge Management and, if anything, serves to ‘stake a claim’ in Knowledge Management territory, in part, as a vehicle for enhancing the professional image and role or the information professional.”[15]
Librarians in general and Documentation and Information Center’s (DIC) librarians and information professionals in particular, do believe that their role in information management combined with their knowledge of the user is really Knowledge Management, but I think that, we librarians and information professionals have been involved for years, in KM within our libraries and information centers, but now is the time for us to be more involved in the mother institution strategies and plans. Librarians will grasp the opportunity to develop a fully integrated virtual and physical knowledge base both at specific easily accessible geographical locations and directly to the desktop via the Net.
10. Our Knowledge Management Vision:
Knowledge is one of the most valuable assets of the National Center for Research. Knowledge Management and access to evidence is a key element in the delivery of high quality services to researchers and managers of the research institutes. Our Knowledge Management Vision is:
· Capture, share and transfer our organizational knowledge to connect our researchers and
employees to each other, to meaningful content, and to the Information Center
· Increase the wealth of our organization, and enhance our effectiveness to better serve our
Researchers and their communities.
· Expand the use of our researcher’s knowledge and create collaboration between researchers and
the Information and Documentation Center efforts for greater possibilities.
· Place the knowledge needed into the hands of our researchers and create a system to capture
knowledge for future use.
In addition to above summary the Documentation and Information Center provides the following services:
1) Issues Sudan Science Abstract Journal twice a year. The main objectives of the journal are to
make known the scientific, technical, social and economic literature of Sudan and facilitate
their dissemination within Sudan and abroad and we use CDS/ISIS software package for
information storage and retrieval.
2) National Union Catalogue (and now under updating).
3) National Register of Current Research to keep researchers informed about what is going on
researches in Sudan, which issues each two years.
4) The Records of the Researchers of the National Centre for Research, which include all
researches done by Researchers of the Center and their affiliations.
5) Library bulletin, which issues each three months, to keep researchers aware about what is new
in the library
11. Key Tasks for Knowledge Management to be success:
Based on the above summary, the following critical tasks will be pursued by National Center for Research’s libraries in order to work towards the Vision of the service as indicated earlier of this strategy:
1. Standardize and unify all existing library catalogues;
2. Offer library enquiry service via the Web;
3. Work towards merged funding/management opportunities at directorate level taking
into consideration Workforce Confederation developments;
4. Involvement of users in the development of the service;
5. Clearly identify service levels/standards;
6. Offer a consistent standard service to all researchers and staffs and their communities;
7. Improve information awareness alerting service.
12. Conclusion
To remain competitive, organizations must efficiently and effectively create, locate, capture, and share their organization’s knowledge and expertise. This increasingly requires making the organization's knowledge explicit and recording it for easier distribution and reuse[16]. Knowledge management is the first major trend to identify information and its management as a crucial element for organizational success. It presents an opportunity for information professionals to have an impact on the organizations that employ them, and for employers to utilize information management and exploitation skills in a creative and value-added way. All information professionals need to fully understand concepts and benefits, different approaches and techniques, and new emerging roles in which information skills are increasingly significant. They need to ensure that business/researches leaders recognize the value that information skills can bring, and they must know how to thrive a multi-skilled, multi-tasked team. Coverage includes: the changing nature of competition, knowledge mapping, information auditing, total quality management and the value of intellectual capital, it emphasizes the core skills, competencies and new contexts that will empower the information professionals.
Reference:
[1] Kalseth, Karl. “Knowledge Management from a Business Strategy Perspective”, FID Review, vol. 1, No. 1, 1999, p. 36.
[2] Ibid, p. 37
[3] Retell, Monica, “Finding the Best to be Best” FID Review, vol. 1, No. 1, 1999, p. 21.
[4] Beckman, Thomas J. “The Current State of Knowledge Management”. Knowledge Management Handbook. Edited by Jay
Liebowitz, Press LLC, 1999, p. 1-5.
[5] Barclay, Rebecca, “What is Knowledge Management”.
[6] Zack, Michael H, “Managing Codified Knowledge”. Sloan Management Review, Volume 40, Number 4, Summer, 1999, p. 2.
[7] Ibid, p. 2.
[8] Beckman, Thomas J. Ibid., p. 1-9
[9] Ibid, p. 1-10
[11] Nassar, Hilda T, “Knowledge Management and its Application at American University of Beirut – Saab Medical Library”.
13th Annual conference, Beirut – Lebanon, October 29 – November 1st, 2002.
[12] Butler, Yvonne,” Knowledge management – if only you knew what you knew”, The Australian Library Journal, vol. 49 (1),
2000, p. 31
[13] Ibid, Barclay, Rebecca, “What is Knowledge Management”.
[14] Ibid, Barclay, Rebecca, “What is Knowledge Management”.
[15] Ibid, Nassar, Hilda, p. 3.
[16] Ibid, Zack, Michael H. p. 1
