Posted by george goodall on October 16, 2003 at 18:47:59:

In Reply to: Re: KM in US libraries and library schools versus aboard posted by Denham on October 12, 2003 at 15:56:43:

Denham:

"rather my perception is library science in general, is behind the curve when it comes to an appreciation of ephemeral, constructed knowledge, in particular, the social, digital and tacit aspects."

I'm not sure about this... perhaps the professional literature is behind but the scholarly LIS literature was ahead of the curve. The fields of "Human Information Behaviour", "Information Seeking in Context", "Everyday Information Seeking", and "Information Environments"--the terms seem interchangeable--have existed for decades.

Brenda Dervin's work on "sense-making" in information seeking dates from the early 1980s and Krikelas's model from 1983. In terms of constructed 'knowledge', Alfreda Chatman's work on the information practices of diverse communities such as women prisoners and seniors in gated communities is seminal. The literature even includes some blistering critiques of the cognitive and systems based research approach that seems prevalent in LIS (e.g., Frohmann's 1992 article- 'The power of images: a discourse analysis of the cognitive viewpoint').

That said, librarians do seem to like their classification schemes and their Information Retrieval tools. These propensities may be an advantage in understanding KM issues. Years of experience in catalogueing resources, answering reference questions, and negotiating esotera like directories, thesauri, and annotated bibliographies, may lead to detailed "tacit knowledge" of KM.

Cheers,
George

www.deregulo.com/facetation

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