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Background and Introduction
Knowledge management (KM) is a newly emerging approach aimed at addressing today's business challenges to increase efficiency and efficacy by applying various strategies, techniques and tools in their existing business processes. It has been described as a process or a set of processes (Abell and Oxbrow, 2001; Townley, 2001; White, 2004), a method of management (Shanhong, 2000), a new dimension of strategic information management (Ponelis and Fair-Wessels, 1998) or the use of organizational knowledge through sound practices of information management and organizational learning (Broadbent, 1998). Although the business model of KM is now being adopted by many non-profit organizations such as libraries, it is not as pervasive as in the business sector. In knowledge organizations such as libraries, several kinds of knowledge need to be managed:
user knowledge (their need, who to contact and information seeking);
resource knowledge (sources and services, where these services are available and other features of resources); and
personnel practice knowledge (expertise available, the quality of service they provide and others).
Moreover, KM can help improve communication among library personnel and between users and service providers, between top management and staff and can promote a culture of knowledge sharing (Teng and Hwamdeh, 2002).
The only studies on library and knowledge management have focused on the relationship between KM and library (Sarrafzadeh et al. , 2010; Roknuzzaman and Umemoto, 2009), the need for KM in libraries (Wen, 2005), KM in academic libraries (Maponya, 2004), librarians' awareness or perceptions of KM (Siddike and Islam, 2011) and KM in state-of-the-art digital libraries (Islam and Ikeda, 2014). A big hurdle in KM implementation in libraries is a lack of clear knowledge as to how to implement KM. What tools and technologies need to be adopted? What are the set of processes and phases involved? Are the people and processes more important or technology tools and systems? Can we simply implement KM by adopting a particular KM tool or system? Most of the research and case studies of KM implementation, whether in libraries or other business organizations, show that there is no silver bullet to implementing KM (Allee, 1997). Each organization must come up with its own template for what is best suited to its needs. Rather than imposing a process or...