Elisabeth Davenport

Knowledge management; semantic drift or conceptual shift?

This paper offers an exploration of knowledge management (KM), a concept only partially understood in domains that use the term. Three such domains are described: library and information science (LIS), business administration, and organization theory. In the first (KM1), KM is predominantly seen as information management by another name (semantic drift); in the second (KM2), it appears to be brought on board as an antidote to excessive focus on process at the expense of human expertise; the third (KM3) articulates a major conceptual shift, presenting organizations as adaptive entities that co-evolve with a given environment. What distinguishes KMl, KM2, and KM3? KM1 and KM2 may be distinguished from KM3 by an over-emphasis on codification, and a myopia with regard to human expertise, tacit knowledge, social learning, trust, and intuition. KM2 and KM3 (in contrast to KMl) focus on the internal as much as the external (reflexivity) and on the critical importance of relationships and exchange (reciprocity). The authors suggest that tensions will arise in any organization committed to KM where different domains have different understandings. KM is a complex and multidimensional concept that requires diverse insights

E-rogenous zones: positioning pornography in the digital economy

Electronic commerce offers immense opportunities to the producers of pornographic products and services. Although this sector generates significant revenues, it is almost invisible in academic literature on the information society and the digital economy, where it is both little discussed and undertheorized. We suggest that a social shaping of technology framework may help explain current moves by stakeholders in the industry to achieve legitimacy, and that this approach may assist future analyses of commercial dynamics in the online pornography sector.

Texts at work: some thoughts on "Just for You" service in the context of domain expertise.

The authors review a number of approaches to just for you service. They suggest that this concept offers opportunities for library and information science (LIS) programs to extend their reach by engaging domain experts who will develop services and architectures grounded in communities of practice. They propose a unifying framework for an extension of LIS education and training and suggest that this be labeled the ethology of text—an extension of Nardis concept of ecology of text. The proposed framework can improve understanding of domain experts at work, if core elements of existing LIS programs (user needs, relevance, indexing, classification) are revisited, unified, and interpreted in the context of local practice. The paper concludes with some observations on professionalism, which address problems of linking communities of practice to knowledge architectures designed by information professionals outside any specialist domain. Outline suggestions for a curriculum that can enhance the performance of texts at work in a given domain are also provided.

Conflicts of Jurisdiction: An Exploratory Study of Academic, Professional, and Epistemological Norms in Library and Information Science

Library and Information science (LIS) faculty, like their peers in other in professional schools, are subject to the demands of at times conflicting jurisdictions: research productivity may clash with professional Service; theory building with the development of craft skills. This paper takes one sub-field in library and Information science, Children and School (C&S), and uses it äs a probe to frame certain questions about academic, professional, and epistemological (A-P-E) norms. We suggest that compliance with norms in these three areas is a criterion of membership of a vocational academic discipline. Non-compliance with all three, however, appears to be the criterion set for a new librarianship, recently advocated in the professional literature. By suggesting that women and children first should be the underlying philosophy of this new discipline, its proponents demand a rejection of existing A-P-E norms. We argue that the call for a new librarianship is a response to conflicts in Jurisdiction which may be resolved by other means.

The virtual apprentice

The CBT (Computer-based training) experience must not be over prescriptive or corrective: one way of avoiding such pitfalls is the production of hypertext materials

Strategic Information Management

Strategic planning can be defined as the search for stability. Strategic planners are not visionaries, but pattern finders, and the goal of strategic planning is to sustain a development path for an organisation. A successful strategy depends on the detection and anticipation of discontinuities in the wider environment which could knock an organisation off its preferred course. Strategy, as Mintzberg argues1, is rooted in the daily, mundane round of company activities rather than in “blue skies” predictions.

Mobilizing the Information Society: Strategies for Growth and Opportunity

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The automation of know how

We disagree with Tom Stonier’s statement (Towards a new theory of information, Journal of Irrforrnatrorr SClcncc 17 (5) 1991, pp. 257-263) that &dquo;Every time an automated machine or a robot replaces a worker, you are dealing with know-how replacing labour.&dquo; (Original italics). Lahour is not replaced hy know how or information, but by an automated machinc or robot rvlr«~Ir errcapsr~lcrtes the knorv hUH’ u% Icrf~c~rrr. When it is possible to define or determine the instructions which retlect the underlying structured of a task, it then becomes possible to carry out that task with a human or a machine of some description (usually, hut not always, a computerbased system), because the task can then he descrihed in terms of an algorithm which can hc followed hv either. There are maw tasks which have succumbed to this tcndcncy tollowrng the rapid growth of n : there remain many for which. for the moment at least, no such structure can be determined, and which cannot therefore be automuted. It ns a matter ot considerable dehate as to whether all human activities wll eventuate be found to have a structure, or whether there BB 111 always be some intellcctu~rl tasks ~~hich remain. as it were. &dquo;irrationat&dquo; and for which there is no underlying algorithm. Kennedy suggests that &dquo;human; fill the roles in productive processes that are uneconomical to mechamze&dquo; (1, p. 156] and that once it becomes ecunumic~rl and technically feasihle to replace human lahour (physical or mental) with a machine, replacement wtll occur. Certain)B. the period smce the end of World War