Architectural Record magazine often provides management ideas that are applicable to many professions. In their latest issue they investigated how architectural firms are leveraging “knowledge management” to “share insights, avoid reinventing the wheel, support new-employee training, and keep expertise in-house when individuals leave.” Knowledge management is about creating, organizing, and distributing a group’s collective expertise and wisdom.
As I look at the evolving landscape of school libraries and how we might serve our students and staff, it seems that providing knowledge management services for our districts would be a natural fit. Indeed, the article states that the challenge for companies is “identifying people to act as writers, librarians, and teachers – to create clear and compelling content, organize it, and impart it to the rest of the company.”
When I think of our district’s cumulative lesson plans, best practices, professional connections, unique expertise – in fact, our collective professional wisdom – going unorganized, unarchived, and hence largely untapped; it begs a solution. Of course, there needs to be “a root person ... believing the way forward is to share experience and get smarter.”
That said, I think school librarians are in a unique position with our skills and tools to organize the explicit and tacit knowledge of our organization (that is to say the resources we are and have created ourselves!) to truly support our schools.
No comments:
Post a Comment