This chapter presents the overview of academic libraries, the adoption of social media in academic libraries, the copyright concern in academic libraries, the concept of knowledge management (KM), the overview of KM in academic libraries, and the significance of KM in academic libraries. KM in academic libraries includes a process of collecting, organizing, classifying, and disseminating the library resources and materials throughout academic libraries. Knowledge in the context of academic libraries can be created through understanding the library user needs and requirements as well as the university's curricula. The adoption of KM is required for academic libraries that seek to serve academic librarians and educators, increase academic performance, strengthen competitiveness, and achieve continuous success in the information age. The chapter argues that applying KM has the potential to enhance the educational performance and reach strategic goals in academic libraries.
TopIntroduction
In library and information science (LIS), the importance of research to practice has been increasingly recognized in academic libraries (Luo & McKinney, 2015). For LIS, as for other types of organizations, one of the most useful solutions that can be adopted in order to survive and to be successful in a society dominated by knowledge, is to implement the knowledge management (KM) process (Porumbeanu, 2010). KM is implemented in the work environments and in non-profit organizations, such as academic libraries (Huang, 2014). Academic libraries by virtue of their resources and services are the source of academic activities (Bello & Mansor, 2011). KM extends librarian expertise beyond collection management to KM and facilitates the academic library services to cohere with the instructional goals of universities (Branin, 2003).
The concept of the academic libraries has developed from library science to information science and to knowledge development (Okorafor, 2010). Research serves to create the new knowledge and contribute to the growth of LIS as a profession. It is required to better equip librarians to provide the optimal information services to practitioners in other fields (Powell, Baker, & Mika, 2002). Academic libraries have evolved from focusing on the management of physical resources and related services to transforming resources and services into the digital information formats toward promoting the teaching, learning, and research (Choi & Rasmussen, 2009). Academic libraries seek reputation by expanding their library collections with the aim of supporting learning and research (Giannakopoulos, Koulouris, & Kokkinos, 2014).
The purpose of academic libraries is to support teaching and learning in colleges and universities (Song, Zhang, & Clarke, 2014). Academic libraries offer services and resources ranging from the physical to the electronic, and that span the range of the information life cycle concerning the creation, collation, storage, retrieval of information (Detlor & Lewis, 2015). Librarians virtually offer reference services anywhere (Yang & Dalal, 2015). Regarding KM, reference services are provided through the virtual worlds, such as Second Life (Godfrey, 2008), through web conferencing tools, such as Adobe Connect (Arvin & Kaiser, 2012), and through the Web 2.0 websites, such as Twitter (Arya & Mishra, 2011). Librarians continue to pursue the virtual reference technologies in order to meet the library users' requirements in academic libraries (Yang & Dalal, 2015).
The strength of this chapter is on the thorough literature consolidation of KM. The extant literature of KM provides a contribution to practitioners and researchers by describing the multifaceted applications of KM to appeal to the different segments of KM in order to maximize the educational impact of KM in academic libraries.