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SEMINAR

“A small group of advanced students . . . engaged in original research or intense study under the guidance of a professor who meets regularly with them to discuss their reports and findings” (American Heritage Dictionary, 3rd ed.).

COURSE RATIONALE

Knowledge Management (KM) is a management movement and discipline that emerged in the early 1990's and is likely to be a permanent fixture in the management constellation. KM has met with mixed reactions in the information disciplines. But any information professional working in the corporate sector (includes a smaller percentage of not-for-profits and government agencies) needs to understand KM and create–often with other units–a role in the organization’s KM initiatives.

Increasingly, libraries and other types of information organizations (e.g., archives, records management units, MIS) are driven by management needs and technology considerations. In order to participate in KM in their organizations, information professionals must learn to become part of the business of the business of their organizations.

COURSE OBJECTIVES

1. There are some 40 disciplines with roles in KM. Our domain rests on the crucial aspect of “information assets” which fuel organizational knowledge and without which there is no KM. While we will learn more generally about KM, we begin with Chun Wei Choo, The Knowing Organization: How Organizations Use Information to Construct Meaning, Create Knowledge, and Make Decisions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), a widely praised work that leads us directly into KM.

2. Foundational understanding/review of management principles and their relationship to libraries and information centers and to KM as a management-driven movement.

3. Learn about forces driving KM emergence, basic KM terminology, trends, authors, theories, practices, technologies, and, to some extent, about the persons who developed them and be able to differentiate how large fields use the term “knowledge.”

4. Be able to articulate how a KM initiative might be started and the role(s) of information professionals in such initiatives.

5. Be able to understand the application of specific technologies in the KM environment.

6. Begin to understand the types of occupational opportunities open to graduates in the information sciences.