Jennifer A. Bartlett - Knowledge Management: A Practical Guide for Librarians

Jennifer A. Bartlett is the interim associate dean for teaching, learning, and research at the University of Kentucky Libraries. She has worked in academic and public libraries for over twenty years and focuses on public services and academic library management and administration. She is a book review columnist for the publication Online Searcher and the co-editor of Practical Academic Librarianship. She has also served as a member of the International Federation of Library Associations Knowledge Management Standing Committee, and is the co-editor (with Spencer Acadia) of Libraries that Learn: Keys to Managing Organizational Knowledge (2019).

IN THIS CHAPTER

Scientia potentia est.

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER.

L IBRARIES HAVE LONG BEEN CENTERS OF LEARNING and exploration, places where readers and researchers come together to explore vast collections of information, whether in print or online. Libraries are no longer dependent on print materials to serve their users, instead providing a connection to a vast ecosystem of knowledge through technology and professional expertise. With increased resources, however, comes the increasingly crucial need to better organize and manage the librarys internal information assets through developing methods of information collection, efficient dissemination, and leverage of employee expertise. Libraries are now called upon to shift their focus from storing and providing information to establishing networks supporting collaboration, creation, and knowledge sharing. Building a knowledge management (KM) organizational culture speeds up access to information, improves decision-making and efficiency, promotes innovation, and helps librarians connect their patrons with the knowledge and resources they need more quickly and effectively. As the volume and flow of information continues to increase, organizational KM plays an integral role in the important work libraries continue to provide.

Imagine that you are a library director and encounter these situations:

• Debra has been a senior legal researcher in your firm for well over thirty years and announces her retirement. One month later she is vacationing in Hawaii and you realize you dont have access to some of her key files and documentation.
• Many of the student workers at your circulation desk are relatively new and inexperienced. They are unsure how to handle any situation other than basic book checkout, including registration of new borrowers, directing visitors to faculty offices, and responding quickly to building emergencies.
• You are interested in building a popular reading collection in Russian in your public library to serve the local community, so you hire a translator to help select titles. You discover after the initial phases of the project have begun that a librarian in one of your branch libraries grew up in a multilingual household and is fluent in Russian.
• A high school librarian develops a library materials database to help teachers with their lesson plans and emphasize basic information literacy skills for incoming freshmen. Another librarian in the same school system is working on a similar, but separate project.

At their core, these are all information-related problems with real consequences for you as a manager. You dont have access to the accumulated information gathered over years by a veteran employee, and so lose time trying to reconstruct it on the fly. Training of a student workforce that rotates in and out relatively often is difficult, time-consuming, and disorganized. Scarce budget dollars go toward hiring someone with a skill set when that expertise was already available on staff. Professionals operating in silos duplicate their efforts when they could have been combined. The information is all there, but its not organized or coordinated. Managers and frontline employees waste precious time and resources trying to find and organize the information that already exists.

Professionals in library and information science are skilled at gathering, creating, preserving, storing, and disseminating information, so its more than a little ironic to find ourselves in a position information disorganization, if not chaos. However, libraries are just as susceptible to the breakdown of internal information and knowledge channels as any other professionbanking, law, information technology, and many others. Regardless of industry, the need for deliberate and efficient methods to handle internal knowledge is essential.

Organizing institutional information is a crucial and growing problem. Nearly forty years ago, John Naisbitt wrote in his bestselling book Megatrends that the new and evolving American society emerging from the end of the industrial era in the late 1950s faced restructuring in ten critical areas. First among these was the megashift from an industrial to an information society. In the new information economy, power would move away from economic assets owned by few to information assets shared by many:

Unlike other forces in the universe, however, knowledge is not subject to the law of conservation: It can be created, it can be destroyed, and most importantly it is synergeticthat is, the whole is usually greater than the sum of the parts. Notes Peter Drucker, The productivity of knowledge has already become the key to productivity, competitive strength, and economic achievement. Knowledge has already become the primary industry, the industry that supplies the economy the essential and central resources of production. (Naisbitt 1982, 1617)

If knowledge was a primary industry several decades ago, how much more crucial has it become with the explosion of information technologies and trends such as the Internet of Things, smart phones, artificial intelligence, Big Data, and digital media? Recent advancements in technology and social media have made a vast amount of information more available more quickly, but does that necessarily translate into useful and actionable knowledge for organizations? What are the implications of artificial intelligence tools that may allow employees to extract targeted data in seconds to assist with decision-making? How can knowledge possibly be managed in this rapidly changing, fluid information environment?

Around the same time that Megatrends appeared, the term KM began appearing in business and management literature, most notably by influential management consultant and author Peter Drucker. Driven by massive and rapid economic, social, and technological change beginning in the latter half of the twentieth century, businesses sought new ways to retain employee knowledge and be more responsive to the information needs of a global economy. Although capturing information to become more competitive and successful was certainly desirable in theory, the practice of KM proved to be difficult. KM was often seen as just another new management fad, and how it operated in different industries and work environments only added to the confusion.

But regardless of industry, the need remained to give employees the tools they needed to access, store, and share information in order to serve their customers, clients, and patrons. In essence, KM connects information and people in an organized way. It refers to the general process of creating, sharing, and managing the information and knowledge within an organization to achieve the goals of the organization. KM, then, is an organizational initiative that aims to gather, create, organize, and replicate information and knowledge to minimize situations involving loss of vital business data, disorganized training, and replication of effort.