A Knowledge Audit in the Acquisitions Department of a university library

Abstract

Purpose: This paper discusses a knowledge audit conducted in the acquisitions department of the main library of University of Colombo, Sri Lanka. The purposes of conducting this knowledge audit was to provide evidence of all knowledge which have not been documented so far but currently available in the acquisitions department; to identify all knowledge required to perform the tasks related to acquisitions; to ascertain the gaps between the currently available knowledge and the knowledge actually required for the efficient functioning of the department and to provide empirical evidence to the management for future development activities. Methodology: The methodology employed for the research consists of six stages; 1) Orientation and background study of the department 2) diagrammatising all the functions, processes and decision making instances related to the department. 3) Analysing each function, process and decision making instance to elaborate the sequential individual tasks performed to accomplish a given job. 4) Listing all tacit and explicit knowledge sources currently available in the department. 5) Visualisation of tacit departmental knowledge indicating the strengths and weaknesses and 6) Making recommendations to the management based on the findings. Participative observations, group discussions, in-depth interviews, and focus group meetings with the senior executive staff were employed as well as review of related documentation to collect the necessary data. Findings: The knowledge audit led to six significant and original explicit outcomes; 1) the Process Map 2) the Task Analysis 3) Inventories of current tacit and explicit departmental knowledge 4) Knowledge Need Analysis (KNA) 5) the Knowledge Map and 6) Formal job descriptions and person specifications for all posts in the acquisitions department which were not available before. Research Limitations: The necessary environment which facilitates the knowledge audit was absent because the concept is still new to the Sri Lankan library context. Any audit instruments or protocols built up in the library context were not available for the researcher. Hence the specific instruments had to be created with the support of the similar instruments developed in other countries. A second constraint was the absence of awareness of knowledge concept among

1 A shorter version of this paper was published as Knowledge Audit in a university library: a case study. In the Proceedings of the 8th National Conference of the Sri Lanka Library Association. 28th June 2011. Ed. By Shivanthi Weerasinghe and Wathmanel Senevirathne Colombo. SLLA. 2011. pp.20-35. Available at http://www.slla.org.lk/images/stories/docs/activities/publications/naclis/2011/proceedings_2011_Part2.pdf 2 the staff. Articulation of their knowledge was difficult due to lack of practice and the in-depth questionnaires used in other case studies to capture organisational knowledge could not be utilised in this context. Therefore capturing the tacit knowledge was a slow and tedious process with a considerable involvement of the researcher in eliciting information from them