Like in my last post, I chose to read a piece this week dealing with academic libraries. As I mentioned last week, I'm interested in an academic track, so these articles have a particular relevance to my projected future. The Townley piece begins with a discussion of what I've been thinking of in my head as "feral" knowledge management systems-- those created in the wild in response to perceived need and separate from any formal KM theory or information professionals. It treats knowledge as an environment to be manipulated as well as an asset to be capitalized upon.

It also features one of the cleaner definitions of KM I've seen-- "Knowledge management may be defined as the set of processes that create and share knowledge across an organi­zation to optimize the use of judgment in the attainment of mission and goals. It is an emerging discipline developing on the
interstices of organizational psychology, library and information science, economics, and computer science. It involves cap­turing an organization’s goal-related knowledge as well as knowledge of its
products, customers, competition, and processes, and then sharing that knowl­edge with the appropriate people throughout the organization. Further, knowledge management seeks to support
communities of practice in creating and using knowledge. Finally, it accepts the notion that knowledge transmission is primarily a human activity. Thus, knowl­edge management is the art of creating value from an organization’s knowledge assets."

The Tsoukas piece defining organizational knowledge makes a few good points about the organic natues of knowledge creation and sharing within organization, and the tacitness of its existence. I get a real sense reading this piece that "organizational knowledge" is worth more than the sum of its parts-- that there exists an invisible reservoir of knowledge that is more than any one person can know.

Finally, I chose to read an article on "informational cities" because it was a term I found intriguing. It relates to the concept of the information society which has been mentioned in many of the readings. in some ways, this makes it difficult to take seriously-- all the readings I've done so far related to the (romantic) (idealized) information society have been skeptical (as my classmates can attest). It talks about the shrinking of the world in response to digital information technology and "glocalization" (which is a word I hated on sight). The idea of community interaction is one that appeals to me but I find this kind of forward-thinking optimism a little cloying. I do, however, enjoy the idea of a city-- as an organization, above-- as a living thing, separate from and greater than the individuals that make it up.

~*~
Readings Discussed
Stock, W. G. (2011). Informational cities: Analysis and construction of cities in the knowledge society. Journal of the American Society of Information Science and Technology, 62(5), 963-986. doi:10.1002/asi.21506

Townley, C. T. (2001). Knowledge management and academic libraries. College and Research Libraries, 62(1), 44-55. URL:http://crl.acrl.org/content/62/1/44.short

Tsoukas, H. (2001). What is organizational knowledge. Journal of Management Studies, 38(7), 973-993. doi:10.1111/1467-6486.00268