Harnessing the Hive in Harnessing the Hive in Libraries and LibrarylandLibraries and Libraryland

Meredith FarkasMeredith FarkasALA AnnualALA Annual

June 24, 2007June 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?• Blogs

• E-mail

• Instant Messaging, Twitter, etc.

• One-on-one conversations

• Staff meetings

• Scraps of paper at the reference desk

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!

mgfarkas@gmail.comLinks and slides at

http://meredithfarkas.wetpaint.com