As the Information Age coalesces to one point of access, Tulsa's Central Library can be this center of Knowledge Management for the entire city and county.
Knowledge Management (KM) within Knowledge Societies unites huge databases through one source made available to each personal computer via the Internet. The future of libraries is in uniting this digital information from numerous sources, not necessarily in expanding the physical facility.
Whether a reference, archival or market survey source, KM could access every city document, newspaper and magazine article and historical photos of the Mayo Hotel immediately from any computer with links to the Tulsa Historical Society's documents and every City Council proceeding discussing it, as well as other legal documents, locally, nationally and globally.
Since Tulsa's history was the foundation and business model of today's global oil business, KM can turn this history into a national resource, which will shine like a beacon to the world.
Knowledge Management begins with a basic resource, such as the online card catalog of the library, and connects through hyperlinks to all related documents, books, newspaper articles, theses, digitized historical collections, law cases, high school and college papers, and oral histories of the community; and could extend to other documents online, such as vital records.
With the digitization of almost all books through the Google Book project and once the legal issues are resolved with Open Book Alliance and others, any computer will connect to almost all of the books ever written. This is an advantage to a library system such as Tulsa's, which can access all of this information through computers throughout the system and at home.
Through Google and others, books will be able to be printed "on-demand" at Expresso Book Machines for under $5, or downloaded onto an e-reader such as a Kindle, according to the Financial Times, or onto Apple's new iPad.
In May 2009, an economic survey by Forrester Research of Cambridge, Mass. predicted that two million digital e-readers would be sold in 2009 with the ability to download from one million free public domain books from Google.
The eBooks Summit in Washington, D.C. on March 18, 2010 emphasized how eBooks and social networks, such as Facebook, complement each other.
The Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute and the British and Irish Legal Information Institute strive to bring global legal information digitally to the global community. Roberta Shaffer, the new Law Librarian of Congress, envisions her library as a World Law Library for the 21st Century by unifying technologies and materials in multiple languages.
As an example of further linked online resources, the Great Library of Alexandria (Egypt), Bibliotheca Alexandrina, has undertaken a huge digitization project described recently at the University of Tulsa by Ismail Serageldin, Librarian of Alexandria. He said the New Bibliotheca Alexandrina is to be: the window of the world on Egypt; the window of Egypt on the world; an instrument for rising to the digital challenge; a center for dialogue between peoples and civilizations. Tulsa can take a similar strategy with the Tulsa City-County Library system being a window of the world on Tulsa and be the window of Tulsa to the world.
Knowledge Management can also serve as an "economic survey" for potential sales for Tulsa businesses through the U.S. Department of Commerce National Technical Information Service and their National Technical Reports Library through an alert system of recent government-sponsored research grant projects. These would be available to everyone and will invite business opportunity and tourism to Oklahoma.
For individual personal growth, the New York Public Library has always prided itself as "Everyman's University," where citizens can be self-taught. Now more than ever, resources are available digitally to do this in Tulsa. Now is an opportunity for Tulsa to take a lead in the march to digitization of Knowledge Management within the current facility.
As an example of this approach working in another city, Brian Gambles from the Birmingham (England) City Council described their library this year as "a hub of the local knowledge economy" at the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA). Also, individuals could add content, such as high school, community college and university term papers and theses, to the KM system by using a Drupal-based system similar to the New York Public Libraries.
Further, Art Murray and Ken Wheaton in "The Future of the Future: Rise of the Knowledge Librarian" state that the knowledge librarian should be the "content czar," understand strategic information needs and be a lead agent of change.
In other words, instead of trying to "catch up" on collections and buildings, let's jump ahead to the digitized future. We are at an historic juncture when important information (books, writings, records, transactions) will be digitized and soon connected.
For the future, the next City Librarian of Tulsa should bear these ideas in mind to connect Tulsa. This position is crucial if Tulsa is to develop as a knowledge economy on the global scene for the future.
Larry Guthrie, a native Tulsan, served as a law librarian for the current Attorney General of the United States for eight years.
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There is valuable information in both of these comments. To the first one I would add that Rupert Murdoch, Chairman and CEO of News Corp, on April 5, said the future of newspapers is on iPads; the sales of Electronic Books topped $50 million in the 4th quarter of 2009; and the Public Library Association (PLA 2010) speaker Michael Porter said,"Libraries need a new electronic content access and distribution infrastructure." We need to advocate politically on behalf of everyone having access to this medium because a well-informed electorate is most important. Print books remain crucial in this effort, also.
Further, the Google Books Library Project is scanning from the collections of Harvard University, New York Public Library,the University of Michigan, the University of Oxford, and numerous others. I'm sure we will be amazed at the number of books available online in our lifetime. Virtually, every book published now has an electronic version available and a significant number of books and journals are online only. Even many medieval manuscripts are available digitally now (see my article "Tulsa's Medieval Future").
To the second comment, I would add that TCCL could add to its many valuable services and collections a home page that is relevant and useful every day to every citizen in Tulsa County, organized along the lines of USA.gov. Such a website could offer large print online books, and audio books which are downloadable. Along with record retention, KM can facilitate access many useful tools. PLA 2010 also recommended that,"Federal, State and Local Government agencies should support libraries as points of access for eGovernment services."
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I found this article to be quite naive regarding library services.
For starters, the Google Book project is not, even in my lifetime, going to have the contents of every book. To portray it as such is misleading as best.
Secondly, the library world as a whole serves a varied commnity of people, many, many of whom will never own a computer, Ipod, or other such device.
The library should explore and continue to offer digital services; indeed now you can look up information on online databases (much too expensive for the common person); read an ebook; download an audio book, etc. TCCL will no doubt continue to do so, while they also attend to the needs of the person who prefers a book.
I would invite Mr. Guthrie to shadow a library at a busy public library someday, and see if his theory still stands.
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While the author makes several valid points about the need for Knowledge Management and I concur with his observations of KM leadership in the Tulsa library system, he has taken a very narrow view of Knowledge Management that is more appropriate for document management or records retention. When KM was first introduced in the early 2000 timeframe, many people attempted to explore it as simple knowledge capture and storage. As a result, it was viewed as a subset of library scienced and library functions.
That perspective resulted in a great deal of money spent on technology and repositories to capture and manage documents and records of different types. This is an important contribution and has led to many positive results. However, this approach did little to capture actual knowledge and then make the knowledge useful it in a meaningful way.
KM has now matured into formal processes and practices that cover a much wider, and more significant, range. If an organization hopes to see the value of Knowledge Management, they must implement formal strategies for Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Capture, Knowledge Organization, Knowledge Retention, Knowledge Use and Knowledge Transfer.
KM further relies on formal practices within an organization that encourages 1) the creation of communities of practice that support the above mentioned processes, 2) an organizational culture that encourages organizational learning through individual learning, 3) the recognition and constant refinement of best practices and 4) strategies that encourage knowledge sharing.
While the early vision for KM supported some of these elements, it has also lead us to overwhelming collections of content that is actually clutter. As Dr. Suliman Hawamdeh, a KM professor at OU and the chair of the International Conference on Knowledge Management, is known to observe, "Organizations have transformed their intranets, wikis and databases into dumping grounds for unreliable, untrustworth and unsearchable information."
Today's Knowledge Management must first start with an inventory of what actually constitutes valuable organizational knowledge and then create a knowledge asset process that is similar to how most organizations manage physical assets. They must then adoopt an organizational strategy on how to implement the above mentioned knowledge processes and practices in a coordinated and integrated manner. Then, and ONLY then, will they see their knowledge become a true asset that provides ongoing value and reduces waste. Then, and ONLY then will organizations realize the benefit of their repository and technology investments.
Anyone wishing to learn more about this larger view of Knowledge Management should attend the annual Knowledge and Project Management Symposium that will be hosted this year on August 4th and 5th by the University of Tulsa. This conference explores emerging trends in KM and is jointly supported by the University of Oklahoma, Oklahoma State University and Tulsa University along with several professional societies. Speakers span many indrusties but are connected through this common understanding of KM. Information on this conference is available at www.kipanet.org.
Chuck Tryon is a business consultant who, since the late 1980s, has helped major organizations transition to the realities of the Knowledge Age. He has collaborated with Dr. Hawamdeh on numerous papers and research projects. He is also the co-chair of the annual Knowledge and Project Management Symposium held in Tulsa each year. Some of the research results and papers are available without cost at www.TryonAssoc.com.
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