The first article I read was "Knowledge management and academic libraries: special tools and processes to support information professionals " by Ron Jantz. I was interested from the beginning when he compared modern day librarians working in this digital world to clerical assistants and pharmacists who simply monitor the patrons or customers. I also agreed with his assessment that, "In a large, multi-campus university, library operations are as complex and distributed as many business enterprises." Working in a university library myself, I see firsthand how spread out things can be. The idea of a Common Knowledge Database i find to be a wonderful idea. One of the themes that keep coming up in discussions I have with other librarians is that things are changing to the point where librarians are now looked to for a variety of tasks and responsibilities. Just because you are a cataloger does not mean that you will work exclusively with cataloging. Some days you may be asked to where different hats and having a resource like a CKDB would make performing these duties much easier. I also liked how he distinguished between the different types of knowledge and explained how each one is useful in a library setting. I found this article to be informative and contain some good ideas about how to consolidate all the different librarians knowledge within an organization.
The next article read was "Knowledge Management and Academic Libraries" by Charles T. Townley. My favorite quote from this article was by Lew Platt, the CEO of Hewlett-Packard when he said, "If Hewlett-Packard knew what Hewlett-Packard knows, we would be three times more profitable. I thought that line summed up what the advantages of knowledge management can be for a company or institution. To think about the amount of knowledge that is contained within a single university library compared to what is actually known by the whole is astounding. These articles and this class are my real first introduction to knowledge management and from what I have learned so far it is a shame to think that many organizations are still lacking in this field. This article overall seemed to reinforce the ideas that were presented in Jantz's article. Having a location that allows everyone to access the knowledge of their peers would make for a much more effective and useful organization. The one problem I can see arising from this though is that some employees may not want to share their knowledge from fear that it may make them less valuable and useful to their employer. I find this thought a little childish, as it would allow them to preform their duties more effectively, but some people do not think like that.
Tay Pei Lyn Grace's article, "Wikis as a knowledge management tool" was also very interesting. Grace presents the argument that wikis is a much better form of knowledge management as opposed to the previously used "cumbersome management systems." Due to the fact that wikis is so user friendly and allows the expertise presented on it to, "...no longer be in the hands of the few, but rather...from the combined efforts of many." Each user has the ability to add, delete, and edit anything they feel a need to do so with. I knew this article was a solid one when Grace also presented the problems that can be associated with using a service like wikis. Security, training, and catagorizing information all pose potential problems, but so does a lot of other things. Overall I would say that wikis is definitely something an organization should look into if they have recognized a need for knowledge management and are looking for something that is fairly easy to implement and could be used successfully by those who will be using it.
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