Harnessing the Hive in Libraries Meredith Farkas ALA Annual June 24, 2007

Knowledge management All organizations want to make the best use of institutional knowledge. All librarians have different areas of interest and expertise. Our patrons have lots of knowledge that would be useful to other patrons. We usually are pretty terrible at collecting this knowledge.

Information sharing is great! Now how do we keep all that information? One-on-one conversations Staff meetings Instant Messaging, Twitter, etc. Scraps of paper at the reference desk Blogs

Collecting Knowledge from our Patrons

Collecting Institutional Knowledge

Wiki as Intranet Share procedures and policies Share basic info (printer is down, we have a trial of this database, etc.) Share knowledge about reference resources Assignments students are coming to desk about Reference sources in subject of expertise

Remember: If can take time to build knowledge management behavior into the organizational workflow.

Thanks! Links and slides at om