Knowledge Management and the Academy

Universities and colleges generate extraordinary quantities of knowledge and innovation, but in many ways the academy struggles to keep pace with the digital revolution. Growing pressures are reshaping how universities must do business--students expecting enhanced access and support, administrators eager to make data-driven strategic decisions, researchers working in virtual global collaboratories, faculty looking for ways to assess learning outcomes, and computer hackers probing networks for vulnerabilities. The need to manage and assimilate a constantly growing pool of information, technology, and human expertise creates unique challenges for faculty, staff, administrators, and students in the modern university. To meet the needs of these diverse user communities on The Ohio State University (OSU) campus, the Center for Knowledge Management (CKM) was created in 2003 as a unit within the John A. Prior Health Sciences Library. The center's goal is to leverage the strengths of people, processes, data, and technology to foster the creation, analysis, and dissemination of new knowledge. Its teaming of technology professionals (programmers, media designers, and so forth) with information stewards (librarians) has significantly enhanced its ability to transform information services, streamline academic computing support, augment research stewardship, and accelerate the creation of knowledge-based solutions and innovations. A hallmark of this partnership is a robust knowledge management solution that is transforming the ways the expertise and knowledge of faculty and staff are documented and shared at OSU. (Contains 5 figures and 14 endnotes.)