Academic Libraries as Complex Systems

Top

Abstract

The purpose of this chapter is to describe how the concepts and principles from the Systems Approach may be helpful in understanding and modeling the collaborative group cognitive processes in information handling in an academic library. In order to address complexity and dynamics, this chapter analyzes several theoretical positions, which together may help us to shape the academic library from a comprehensive and systemic point of view (such as Systems Approach, Communities of Practice, Activity Theory and the Viable System Model). This chapter suggests focalizing on the activity (performed by a community) as the basic unit of analysis in studying the complexity of academic libraries. This activity is what allows the transmission of tacit and explicit knowledge and the skills from an expert to a novice. Other elements in the activity are objectives, rules and regulations, and importantly the learning processes that occur dialectically between subjects and community. A model such as Beer´s in the way the authors presented it in this chapter fits well to decompose reality and synthesize it to analyze the proposed complexity. This may allow facing organizational problems by focusing in the way people act to transform the inputs into products and add value to them by teaching and learning.