9. Librarians’ role in Knowledge Management

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