I'd like to begin this blog with a discussion of knowledge: what it is, how we deal with it, and what this implies for managing a collection of artifacts.
Michael Polanyi's book The Tacit Dimension really spoke to a concept I've thought about off and on for several years-- he phrases it as "we know more than we can tell" on page 4 of his book (a description which is reiterated throughout the text). It's a difficult concept to illustrate-- by its very nature, no doubt, as the things we know but cannot tell by definition cannot be trotted out as evidence. Polanyi provides several excellent examples in his text but I would like to provide one of my favorites from the beginning of my consideration of this question before I move on to the concept of "tacit knowledge" as it is discussed in other texts.
Psychology has long held the idea that people are very good at "reading" each other-- whether someone means us harm or is lying is something most of us have some level of intuition for (and scientific study bears out that we often know more than we think we do, as long as we don't overanalyze our gut reactions). However, we find ourselves at a loss to explain how we come to these conclusions. In the absence of a cartoonish tell like a small child or a poker player in a movie, the signs are subtle and, individually, often escape our notice. We put our knowledge that we are being deceived or that someone is up to no good down to a feeling, because it is indescribable in logical terms. We don't know how or why we know this, but somehow that information was conveyed. And we would be at a complete loss to tell someone else how we figured it out (unless we are Sherlock Holmes or a trained behavior specialist).
Cowan et al (2000) address the (then) nearly 50-year-old concept of "tacit knowledge" as a "loaded buzzword." By then, "tacit" knowledge had come to be antonymous with "codified" knowledge-- knowledge which has been cataloged, broken down, organized, and tagged for easier location, consumption, and use.
Chris Kimble's 2013 article "Knowledge management, codification,and tacit knowledge" puts forward several definitions of knowledge, but my favorite is this, on the difference between "information" and "knowledge"-- information exists without association and means nothing on its own. To become knowledge, it must be interacted with by people, put into context, and interpreted. (I put this down to the first syllable of "knowledge" being "know"-- without someone who knows it, information does not become knowledge.) That makes knowledge more interactive and reliant on critical thinking skills than the way it is often used colloquially, but I find this a necessary corollary to move forward.
Kimble also stipulates that some knowledge is transferable ("both an input and an output"), which I would certainly like to believe, or what is the point of what we (teachers, librarians, researchers, humans) do? However, it may or may not be "true" or "real" in a traditional sense, as much of what we would consider "knowledge" is the result of social constructs. This does not make it more or less exchangeable or even personally useful, but it may make it more difficult to properly contextualize and in particular more difficult to remove from context. (Confused yet?)
So: we can understand knowledge, but we may or may not be able to communicate it or even describe it to ourselves. What does this mean for organizing information?
The organization of information is a huge part of the library field. Sanford Berman, one of the first catalogers, called any collection of information which is not cataloged so as to be easily accessible to users "bibliocide." As addressed above, information can only become knowledge if it is reachable by people. But how can we catalog something we can't describe? If we don't know what it is and can't convey it, how can we tag it and relate it to others?
Kimble mentions several very important benefits of codification (which mostly, to me, boil down to how much easier and less reliant on luck the sharing of information becomes when it is codified). The costs of codification Kimble lists (Cowan et al address them too) are a little less obvious, but particularly relevant in the case of tacit knowledge-- the creation and translation of a codebook for organizing knowledge can be subjective and intensive. This limits the applicability of the otherwise very useful field of cataloging, especially when it comes to the intangibles involves in "knowledge." Managing this can be complicated, but I have to believe it is worth it to fight through the dense thicket of ineffability to catalog knowledge.
At core, that's one of the things librarians are: explorers, shining light into the dark caves of unexplored data to uncover helpful knowledge.
I like that fantasy. I hope you do too.
~*~
Readings dicussed:
Cowan, R., David, P. A., & Foray, D. (2000). The explicit economics of knowledge codification and tacitness. Industrial & Corporate Change, 9(2), 211-253.
Kimble, C. (2013). Knowledge management, codification and tacit knowledge. Information Research, 18(2).
Polanyi, Michael. (2009). The tacit dimension. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1966)
