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Editorial 

What We Need Is a Knowledge 
Management Perspective 

One of the most cited articles in College & 
Research Libraries over the last ten years 
has been Charles Townley’s “Knowledge 
Management and Academic Libraries,” 
which was published back in January 
2001. I found this out recently when we 
peer-reviewed and accepted the forthcom-
ing article “A Citation Analysis of College 
& Research Libraries:  Comparing Yahoo, 
Google, Google Scholar, and ISI World 
of Knowledge with Implications for Pro-
motion and Tenure” by Charles Martell. 
Martell’s article provides an interesting 
look at the use of articles from our journal, 
including a table of the top ten most cited 
C&RL articles in the last ten years. 

If you want to read Martell’s forthcom-
ing article, you can. Like most journals 
we have a backlog of accepted articles 
waiting for formal publication. Martell’s 
article was accepted in December 2008, 
but it will not be formally published in 
C&RL until July 2009 or later. However, 
you do not have to wait. You can find it 
right now in its final manuscript form by 
going to our new pre-publication service 
at the College & Research Libraries Web site. 
This service makes C&RL manuscripts 
available “open access” within days after 
acceptance. 

I had not read Townley’s article on 
knowledge management before Martell 
alerted me to it. I would have benefited 
from reading it sooner. (Remember the 
value of literature reviews.) I stumbled 
onto the idea of knowledge management 
all on my own some years ago as I tried 
to make sense of the changing nature of 
collection development work in academic 

libraries. It seemed to me then, and it 
seems even more so today, that academic 
librarians need to extend the range of 
their responsibilities and expertise well 
beyond the traditional, almost exclusive, 
focus on collecting and servicing the 
formally published scholarly literature. 
It is true that our special collections librar-
ians and archivist have paid att ention to 
more unique and ephemeral material, but 
there is so much more “explicit” and even 
more “tacit” knowledge coming from our 
faculty and students that escapes our at-
tention. The field of knowledge manage-
ment provides a useful perspective and 
tools for addressing this broader range 
of librarian responsibility. 

With the rapid development of digital 
information technology and the Internet, 
an individual’s or group’s ability to cre-
ate and disseminate information in an 
un-mediated manner, to self-publish, has 
exploded. One of the best descriptions 
I have read about this more democratic 
and participatory information environ-
ment and how it filled the Internet with 
an extraordinary amount and range of 
content in just one decade is Kevin Kelly’s 
“We Are the Web” (Wired magazine, Au-
gust 2005). The ability to create and share 
information and knowledge is literally at 
our finger tips. Do an inventory or even a 
cursory survey of the types and amount of 
useful, sharable digital information being 
generated by faculty, students, and staff at 
your university or college, and I can wa-
ger you will be impressed by the variety, 
amount, and casual approach to storage 
and preservation of this content. 

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The institutional repository movement 
in academic libraries is one att empt to 
meet this knowledge management chal-
lenge by helping to collect, organize, and 
preserve a broader range of content, now 
most often in born-digital form. Just as 
we created traditional library facilities to 
store print material, we now have digital 
repositories to hold digital content. The 
shelving and the digital asset manage-
ment tools we deploy are important, but 
what really matters is creating eff ective 
service models to fill the stacks or the 
digital repository with the appropriate 
content. The old service model for col-
lection management might have fi lled the 
stacks, but it is not working to fill the in-
stitutional repository. What is needed is a 
much more proactive, fl exible, knowledge 
management perspective and approach 
to designing the new service model in 
academic libraries. 

This is an opportune time for academic 
librarians to extent themselves and be-
come more proactive, more connected 

Editorial 105 

and social in the knowledge-making 
process. The current interest in library 
support for e-science is another interest-
ing manifestation of a new knowledge 
management perspective. It wasn’t long 
ago, as little as ten years ago, when a 
basic activity in any academic science 
library was the acquisition and servicing 
of the current print issues of core science 
journals. Science faculty stopped in the 
library facility frequently to browse and 
read the latest issues of their fi eld’s jour-
nals, the issues carefully arranged and 
cared for by the library staff . All that is 
gone now, with the science journal litera-
ture almost entirely online. What are sci-
ence libraries to do? The new and rather 
daunting responsibilities emerging in sci-
ence librarianship include participation 
on research teams, science data curation, 
and helping manage the whole life cycle 
of scientific information from research 
and discovery to publication and data 
archiving. This sounds like the fruition 
of knowledge management to me. 

Joseph J. Branin 
Editor, College & Research Libraries