Abstract
In this essay, the authors will discuss the similarities and differences of knowledge management and librarianship. They will propose and articulate the emerging role of academic and research libraries as the integrators of digital knowledge and research methods among academic enterprises, a role which they believe will transform librarians to knowledge professionals. The authors will try to answer or stimulate further discussion of multi-dimensional and provocative questions such as: What are the critical differences between knowledge management and library and information science? Will emerging functions or services, such as digital scholarship centers and research data management practices, allow academic and research libraries to more fully perform the functions of knowledge management? Will libraries’ emerging role in the knowledge creation ecosystem help define their new value proposition, from a collection-centric to knowledge-centric service model? How should libraries position library-based digital scholarship centers to be digital integrators for enterprise-wide digital learning, research, and knowledge creation?
Keywords
Introduction
Knowledge management (KM) has been a buzzword in business, as well as a trending topic in academic research. The literature review section of the paper “Knowledge Management Perceptions in Academic Libraries” (Koloniari and Fassoulis, 2017) however, indicated that the adoption of KM by the library and information science (LIS) professionals was very slow, regardless of the potential of KM for the management of libraries and advancement of LIS.
As academic librarians, one could intuitively reason that the profession has been managing knowledge for a very long time, thereby dismissing the need to introduce another term for the same work. Librarians have indeed played a dominant role in collecting and curating knowledge in various forms since the library’s inception, from manuscripts, books, journals, and papers, to images and videos, both analog and digital. The discipline has also created and leveraged shared standards and processes for their classification and access. However, KM is a field of practice quite different from LIS; KM is the intersection of organizational psychology, economics, operations management, and library and information science (Farrell, 2017).
In this essay, the authors will discuss the similarities and differences of KM and librarianship. They will propose and articulate the emerging role of academic and research libraries as the integrators of digital knowledge and research methods among academic enterprises, a role which they believe will transform librarians to knowledge professionals. The authors will try to answer or stimulate further discussion of multi-dimensional and provocative questions such as: What are the critical differences between KM and LIS? Will emerging functions or services, such as digital scholarship centers and research data management practices, allow academic and research libraries to more fully perform the functions of KM? Will libraries’ emerging role in the knowledge creation ecosystem help define their new value proposition, from a collection-centric to knowledge-centric service model? How should libraries position library-based digital scholarship centers to be digital integrators for enterprise-wide digital learning, research, and knowledge creation?
Knowledge management vs. librarianship
The term KM was first coined in the for-profit sector (Koenig, 2018). In essence, it refers to an organization’s efforts to share knowledge of its products, processes, and expertise within (Koenig, 2018). The goal of KM is to increase an organization’s situational awareness and gain competitive advantages over their peers. KM, as a field, became mainstream because knowledge became the most valuable resource under the current economy (Drucker, 1995).
Koenig’s paper pointed out that over time KM also evolved to include knowledge external to the organization and expand from the commercial sector to others, such as government and social and civic organizations. Throughout this evolution its goal remained, increasing organizational efficiency by broadening the sharing of policies, practices, and talents among employees and partners.
The core difference between KM and librarianship is one of scope; KM targets the management of institutional knowledge while librarianship focuses on knowledge created elsewhere. One may argue that as archives, university presses, and libraries merge, libraries have begun curating the institutional knowledge of their parent organizations. Furthermore, the majority of academic libraries have established an institutional repository service, hosting faculty and student papers, along with various gray literature that supports teaching and learning. There is no doubt that libraries have been expanding into KM, and perhaps managing a subset of KM content. If the profession considers the rest of the above KM description, however, libraries have yet to play an essential role in promoting and empowering the sharing and knowledge of university products (e.g. research outputs, scholarship, degree programs, and diplomas), teaching and learning and research processes, as well as linking the various disciplinary and technical expertise of their campuses. Academic publications only represent partial institutional knowledge; institutional records, archives, and university intellectual outputs managed by libraries provide them an opportunity to leap into KM. The social aspect and knowledge creation processes of KM, however, are also critical to its completeness, which are not a part of library operations.
Furthermore, KM includes the identification, documentation, and sharing of both “explicit” and “tacit” knowledge. Hajric’s (n.d.) article referenced several definitions of explicit and tacit knowledge. “Explicit knowledge” is formalized and codified and is sometimes referred to as know-what, and therefore reasonably easy to identify, store, and retrieve. For higher education it may comprise of research topics and methods, scholarship communications, learning/teaching objectives, degree/discipline programs, funding/budget, and facilities/equipment, for example. Libraries only manage a small piece of the explicit knowledge of an institution (intellectual outputs and research information, for example), but the vast majority of the body of knowledge that libraries curate is from external entities. “Tacit knowledge” is referred to as know-how and regarded as intuitive, hard-to-define knowledge that is mostly experience based. Based on this definition, tacit knowledge is often context dependent and personal; therefore, it is hard to communicate and deeply rooted in action, commitment, and involvement. It is also regarded as being the most valuable source of knowledge, and the most likely to lead to breakthroughs in an organization. One may easily conclude that librarianship encapsulates the organization, dissemination, and preservation of a tiny part of the explicit knowledge of their universities; librarianship has not (though it is not said, libraries should not) covered the management of tacit knowledge.
KM is a concept beyond collection acquisitions, classification, access, and preservation; it is capable of providing the ultimate advantage to its organization, that is, excellent research outcomes and learning outcomes of their faculty and students. Current librarianship principally focuses on collection management and related services. Some institutions are more organized than others when it comes to sharing library operational knowledge, but few have thought about playing a role, not to mention a leading role, in the promotion of knowledge sharing at their universities. The literature shows that the practices of KM (Koloniari and Fassoulis, 2017) and readiness of KM (Marouf, 2017) are somewhat limited in academic libraries; Zlatos (2017) even stated the KM practices were poorly understood. There is no evidence from the literature that academic libraries play the role of KM on behalf of their home institutions. Farrell’s article (2017) pointed out that librarianship is in the middle tier of the Knowledge Pyramid about Information Management (data to information to knowledge); reversely, current trends demonstrate that libraries are actually going in the opposite direction by expanding research data management and hiring more data curation librarians and informationists. So should libraries manage all their university’s institutional knowledge? It is difficult to say, and even more challenging to determine whether or not libraries even have the capacity to fulfill such a function at their universities. That said, the authors believe that, at least in the realm of academic knowledge, libraries should begin taking on a more significant, perhaps leadership, role to embrace, interpret, and promote the full scope of KM practices in the academic enterprise.
Knowledge management definitions
So what is KM; its definition and components? KM became popular in the 1990s (Daland, 2016; Fraser-Arnott, 2014; Koenig, 2018). It is part of the field of management studies but also tightly integrated with information and communication technologies (Gao et al., 2017). Multiple versions of the definition have been introduced over time. Perhaps the following three represent KM the best (in chronical order of published time): “Knowledge Management is the process of capturing, distributing, and effectively using knowledge.” – Tim Davenport definition, 1994 (Koenig, 2018) “Knowledge management is a discipline that promotes an integrated approach to identifying, capturing, evaluating, retrieving, and sharing all of an enterprise’s information assets. These assets may include databases, documents, policies, procedures, and previously un-captured expertise and experience in individual workers.” – Gartner Group definition, 1998 (Koenig, 2018) “KM is the set of processes that create and share knowledge across an organization to optimize the use of judgment in the attainment of mission and goals” – Townley definition, 2001 (Farrell, 2017)
Traditionally librarianship engages in the later phases of the knowledge production cycle (again, when discussing academic knowledge rather than the knowledge of an entire university). Creation of knowledge is often found in the faculty’s scope of work, not the librarian’s (later authors would argue that libraries and librarians have an emerging role to collaborate with faculty in knowledge generation). Multiple professions may be responsible for capturing knowledge, e.g. publishers. Libraries typically come into the picture after scholarship and research are published, with the traditional focus on the organization, dissemination, and preservation of knowledge; libraries also have the choice to either acquire publications from their university’s faculty or not.
Another essential KM characteristic is in actions following acquisitions of knowledge for the advancement of the mission and goals of an institution. Both Farrell and Koloniari and Fassoulis explained that KM requires the active engagement of applying information with human expertise to facilitate decision-making and to educate colleagues as to organizational practices and systems.
KM components
According to Koenig, KM is comprised of four components: content management, expertise location, lessons learned, and communities of practice. He referred to content management as Librarianship 101. The focus of this component, however, is in making an organization’s data and information available to the members of the organization through dashboards, portals, and with the use of content management systems, which is not a part of the core services to which librarians apply their skills. The authors believe that librarians may offer valuable skills in the organization, searchability, and discoverability of knowledge if libraries choose to take on this component of KM.
Expertise location is to identify and locate those persons within an organization who have expertise in a particular area. Although libraries might not offer a service to identify all experts in their parent organizations, some have developed services such as ETDs, faculty profiles, research citation analysis, Current Research Information Systems, and e-portfolios for students to find teaching and research expertise.
Lessons learned refers to capturing knowledge embedded in personal expertise and making it explicit, which is KM’s original piece. Libraries have created the means to document their policies and also provide social software, such as wikis and blogs, to facilitate sharing knowledge amongst their employees. However, there is little in the literature demonstrating whether such library practices can scale and enable university-wide knowledge sharing.
Communities of Practice (CoPs) are a crucial component of KM. CoPs are groups of individuals who share the same interests that come together to share and discuss problems, opportunities, and practices to learn from the group (Wenger, 1998; Wenger and Snyder, 1999; and Koenig, 2018 defined). Communities of practice emphasize, build upon, and take advantage of the social nature of learning within or across organizations. Some literature has indicated that the significant difference between LIS and KM are the CoPs. Perhaps CoPs are not a concept that is prevalent at universities or libraries. Often talk series, colloquiums, forums, and conferences are the venues that connect people from the same line of work. Those formats might not occur at the same frequency as CoPs and tend to consume more resources to organize than CoPs. Nevertheless, various socialization opportunities are provided within and outside the university and library communities. As libraries often refer to themselves as a service to all campus constituencies, libraries may perhaps further their CoPs to connect with more cross-disciplinary or interdisciplinary research. The forums mentioned above for sharing knowledge in academic institutions are often disciplinary based, and thus librarians are rarely involved except for their own conferences, workshops, and communities. The hurdle is gaining the users’ recognition of the libraries’ role in helping to accommodate such conversations. Formally established centers on campus are often the places that fulfill this mission.
KM development also distinguishes it from LIS. Generally, KM development can be described in three periods (Koenig, 2018). First, KM was born by IT enablement. Later on, organizations learned that IT was only a foundational piece; for sharing knowledge to be successful and to provide competitive advantages, organizational culture in terms of rewarding systems has to be updated, modified, or enriched. Its third phase was the awareness of the importance of knowledge organization, description, and access. Contrast to LIS, libraries were somewhat backward-staged or reverse-engineered compared to KM, given its more extended existence and establishment as a discipline than KM. There has been a shared recognition of the importance of organizing content. Standards of acquiring, cataloging, and inventorying content has been a common practice for LIS. As IT, an enabling factor for many industries, libraries adapted their practices and introduced online catalogs and other digital services. Perhaps, the HR and culture piece are the latest emerging hot topics of libraries. As libraries have established the hallmark of knowledge systems and held a very stable mission over a long time, the expansion of the above appears to be more difficult compared with other younger industries. Table 1 compares the core differences between KM and Library Sciences.
Comparison of library and information science and knowledge management.
Case introduction: The journey of building strong academic partnership – University of Notre Dame and University of Cincinnati Digital Scholarship Center
As long as libraries have been in the business of the curation and dissemination of academic knowledge, they may also choose to extend their services to knowledge creation, as well as expand to facilitate the application of such knowledge on campus. The above is a strategic shift from collection-centric services to KM for the academic knowledge of the institution. This new role will start to position libraries to help their universities gain “advantages” or “situational awareness” of new research and learning modalities. Centers for Digital Scholarship in libraries are an excellent way of engaging faculty and students, as well as providing a venue to make new knowledge, mint new practices, test new methodologies and pedagogies, and promote and socialize work throughout the entire campus. Therefore KM may be the catalyst for innovations in library services as well as an agent for cultural change in libraries looking to align themselves with the priorities of the academy better.
As collections and access continue to provide value to faculty and students, it is also increasingly evident that LIS as a field is challenged by emerging research interests (e.g. multidisciplinary studies), as well as by the proliferation of digital publications. As library theories and practices in information management were primarily found on discrete disciplines and paper-based publications (books, for example), innovation in information access is a tall order for libraries and library schools to fulfill their missions in support of research and learning. To this end, libraries have been adopting information technology such as search tools, digital storages, indexing software, and web standards and protocols to provide instant discovery to their collections. The profession has witnessed the utilities of full-text indexing and search, semantic and Linked Open Data, concept extraction, and text mining, as well as image recognition and classification in information access. Expanding or adopting KM practices may help libraries to be more innovative since it provides the framework and means to access the insights of faculty knowledge creation and student learning. Such insights are tacit knowledge rather than explicit knowledge. Because tacit knowledge of the academy is often informal, internalized within people’s experiences, emotions, and intuitions, it would be impossible to access without it being a part of the research, teaching, and learning processes. What libraries learned from their users would ultimately inform their practices, and contribute to the evolution of Librarianship. As many libraries have recognized the above necessity, creating positions to manage research and scholarly data (the underpinning unit for any knowledge or understand knowledge), it is both sensible and strategic for libraries also to embrace the analysis, extraction, documentation, and management practices of knowledge. Therefore, expertise in the latitude of the Knowledge Pyramid (data-information-knowledge) would increase the value propositions of libraries to their parent institutions. The following use cases will provide some reflections on how KM has assisted the University of Notre Dame (ND) and the University of Cincinnati (UC) in aligning services with the demands of universities, as well as innovating by obtaining tacit knowledge.
Notre Dame
The Navari Family Center for Digital Scholarship Center (CDS), located in the Hesburgh Library, was launched in Fall 2013 and endowed by the Navari family in 2016. CDS leverages state-of-the-art technologies to transform how teaching, research, and scholarship are performed. The Center focuses on transformative uses of content that result in innovative research or new tools to engage with intellectual materials rather than with passive uses of electronic content, such as emailing or word processing. The followings are goals: Create a “hub” for research and scholarship; Make a transformational leap into the future of knowledge generation; Enable students and faculty to consult on emerging methodologies, analyze data and share results in ways previously not thought possible; Empower the Libraries to preserve new forms of scholarly information in perpetuity; Create profound partnerships campus-wide and enhance the teaching, learning, and research process in every academic discipline; Empower the next generation of scientists and scholars to be adequately equipped to create new knowledge in a digital environment – and to seek new solutions for a better future; Enable Notre Dame students to leave the Academy with the tools they need to make an impact in today’s world.
One of the first projects back in 2013 that CDS worked on was Quantifying the State Trials, which was a collaborative project initiated by a professor of both English and Law across two Colleges (Arts and Letters and Law). The project was the first in which CDS utilized quantitative digital humanities methods to recognize their potentials, and it offered the first-hand experience to the libraries to the world of the creation of knowledge – the work later would support the professor’s research for his forthcoming book.
The learning was both intense and impactful for one type of future work of CDS since the project had a very tight deadline for an upcoming talk at a symposium eight to nine weeks out. The most critical aspect of the learning was the research questions and methodologies that the professor brought into the project. Specifically, he was interested in finding the relationship between religious tolerance and political economy in the period 1649–1700 in England. He decided to test how computational methodologies may assist in providing new findings otherwise done traditionally.
Considered the learning of the research topics and methodology was the “know-what” part of KM, the part described below was the “know-how” part of KM. First, the research topic and non-traditional approach presented new challenges to the libraries, in the norms of collection services. Typically libraries provide access to collections either on shelves or vendor databases via the Internet. This project required us to prepare and process collections into a different state or manifest with which computational tools could interact. The team needed to work on the 36 volumes of the State Trials document, a series of essential English court cases, covering topics of religion, treason, witchcraft, bigamy, and homicide. One of the ND Library’s database subscriptions, HeinOnline, provided digital surrogates for Volumes 4–14 of the State Trials. Since the original volumes were printed in the early 1800s, its feature characters and fonts in a mixed columnar layout with notes are problematic for processing them for text analysis tasks. However, because of the above obstacles, the team realized the gap between current collection services with emerging research; therefore, the group explored outside of the standard toolsets identifying newer technologies to meet their demands. A new suite of toolsets emerged that helped to lower OCR errors, parsing each case from the online text, text mining, visualizing concepts identified from the corpus, and conducting fundamental sentiment analysis. The work mentioned above allowed the libraries to learn what was required to facilitate such research beyond collection access. By the end of the project, the team created a new “edition” of those cases alongside its original text and its online edition for computational purposes. The participation of the above research conceptualized and substantiated our understanding of research demands, as well as expanding our capabilities in LIS to advance those agendas. The authors have seen the transformation of collections for text-mining and analysis on the rise as the type of research which gains ground in faculty circles. One example in this area is the Collection as Data project (see Recommended Reading).
Second, another critical piece of know-how that the libraries learned was the organization and management of such projects. Besides the professor and project primary investigator, the team brought in a research assistant who held a PhD degree in Digital Humanities, librarians who understood how libraries work and could also code, and a programmer who could code and also held a PhD in Mathematics. Furthermore, a librarian who worked with data and could manage projects provided a structured way to approach the work in order to complete it on time. All team members actively met frequently to test the most suitable computational methodologies for addressing the research questions. Given the exploratory nature of the work, the group engaged in constant dialogues to ensure that the digital methods being employed and the data generated by the use thereof were useful to the humanities research question being addressed. All team members responded well to the iterative nature of the project.
ND Libraries learned the importance of bringing in the necessary and right types of expertise. The work also introduced us to the combined workflow of digital scholarship, that the creation of new knowledge has increasingly become a multidisciplinary endeavor which requires multiple domain experts, whether disciplinary or professional, working closely together to achieve a common goal. This trend pushes the envelope of the question of ownership – more specifically, digital scholarship moves humanists’ solo quests for knowledge into the realm of collaborative teamwork. From this project, CDS acquired the knowledge and built the necessary infrastructure to support such work. CDS was able to provide consultations for similar work or variations of such scholarship to patrons and develop a series of workshops/instructions to the campus.
In summation, the involvement of knowledge creation or engagement in the early stages of the knowledge life cycle offered the libraries a retrospective on the emerging methodology, technologies and tools, and team makeups and dynamics as examples to demonstrate possible factors contributing to the success of digital humanity work. By assessing this project, the ND Libraries were able to produce a more systematic and user-friendly support model, which could be re-used and scaled in similar digital humanities projects. Without this expansion into the world of KM, it would have been impossible for the libraries to learn the “know-what” and ”know-how” of the knowledge they sought, and they would not have been able to develop a community to document and share the implicate knowledge and practices with various user communities. Because of the establishment of CDS, the ND Libraries started to play a more essential role in the academy.
Cincinnati
The University of Cincinnati’s Digital Scholarship Center (DSC), located in the Walter C Langsam Library, is a joint venture between the College of Arts and Sciences and the University Libraries. On campus and in the community the DSC serves as a catalyst for hybrid forms of research and teaching, bringing together humanistic methods with technical innovations to test paradigms and to create new knowledge at the boundary between disciplines as they are conventionally imagined in humanities and beyond.
The DSC focuses on enterprise-wide digital knowledge and research method integration across multi-disciplines. The DSC strives to enable scholars to not only seek for KM “know-how” and ”know-what”, but also wants to stimulate scholars to answer “so-what” questions from new and unique research angles, which they might not be able to do without DSC’s assistance in creating a campus-wide multidisciplinary professional networking, computational research methods, tools and platforms. The DSC uses methods such as data visualization, computational text analysis, digitization/imaging/3D modeling, and geographic information systems (GIS), among many other approaches, to discover new dimensions of complexity and nuance in humanistic and cultural datasets that conventionally have not been studied by these digital techniques. The multidisciplinary team of DSC includes a combination of domain knowledge experts and scholars from humanities, social sciences, arts and design, and biomedical sciences, as well as technical experts from software development, project management, and librarianship. The center is led by a digital humanist who has cross-training and experience in research computing, basic science, and medieval literature studies.
The DSC was awarded in 2018 a $900,000 grant from the Andrew W Mellon Foundation to advance the “catalyst” model for digital scholarship (DS) across multiple disciplines. The Mellon Foundation grant supports the transdisciplinary teams in creating and disseminating computational tools and human-interpretable research products that will allow a wide range of scholars, librarians, administrators, students, and interested members of the public to engage with and use this experimental blend of research methods and insights. In partnership with faculty and motivated by their research questions, the DSC teams serve as a catalyst, to use the chemical metaphor, by synthesizing a reaction of different components into a cohesive product and by reducing the barrier to entry for such a reaction to commence. The DSC has assembled research groups that genuinely span multiple disciplines, drawing from the “team science” model used in mostly biomedical research, with people trained to think in interdisciplinary ways about every step in the research process: formulating research questions, gathering relevant data, analyzing information, and presenting conclusions. The DSC strives to develop the potential for new transdisciplinary strategies and practices for digital scholarship centers to overcome challenges in the transition from a service-oriented model to a more active model of intellectual partnership in the research enterprise within the knowledge creation ecosystem. To enhance the modern ways of new knowledge dissemination, the center plans to work with newly created University of Cincinnati Press, which is also a division of university libraries, to actively pursue the new modes of open access-based digital scholarship publishing with a broad goal of influencing more diverse format scholarly records output, 21st-century faculty promotion and tenure, scholarly productivity credential, and modernity and open access readership.
Upon receiving an Andrew W Mellon Foundation grant award, the DSC created a sub-grant named a Catalyst Award for multidiscipline participants across campus. All projects sponsored by the sub-grant aim to increase university-wide digital knowledge integration capacities by introducing novel digital knowledge and research methods in a trans-disciplinary manner. Summarized below are several sample projects to illustrate how the DSC functions as a digital knowledge and research methods integrator that bridges, enhances, and accelerates trans-disciplinary research.
PI: Sarah Jackson. Scholar domain subject: Anthropology, College of Arts and Sciences.
Background and knowledge outcome aims:
Recent work on Classic Maya materiality has examined culturally specific frameworks about objects and materiality. The project team is now asking questions about analogous topics with regard to modern archaeologists. What are scholars’ explicit or implicit beliefs about the artifacts we work with, and how might scholars’ specific perceptions of these objects impact the research we carry out? As a starting place in this undertaking, the team examines published articles on Maya archaeology, using large-scale text mining approaches, such as topic modeling, word2vec, and metadata visualization. To perform this analysis, the team uses datasets of raw texts from the journals Ancient Mesoamerica and Latin American Antiquity. The team uses batch data sets of all transcribed full-text articles from the complete journal runs in a machine-readable format. The team used these data for aggregated text-mining analysis. This project has produced successful knowledge outcomes including an article MS submitted to Latin American Antiquity (peer-reviewed journal), and a conference presentation at Society for American Archaeology and/or a digital humanities scholarship venue. The project also created reuse-able digital integration process and research methods that can apply to other disciplines.
PI: Felix Chang. Scholar domain subject: Antitrust Law Studies, College of Law
Background and knowledge outcome aims:
The project examines the question of how courts and regulatory agencies balance competition and sector regulation concerns. Through the DSC machine learning platforms, the scholar proposes to analyze approximately 55,000 federal cases and 300,000 entries in the Federal Register tracking rulemaking activities. The platform can answer broad questions, such as the words and guiding principles that courts and agencies look to in striking that balance, as well as narrow questions, such as the effect of major decisions or trends upon the evolution of the legal doctrine. This project tries to apply digital research methods with a focus on large data sets mining to enrich findings of research questions such as: How has the legal doctrine on this balance evolved over time? How do courts balance antitrust and regulation? More specifically, does this balance vary depending on the industry or harm alleged? This project intends to produce a set of academic articles from this research. Articles for publication will be in a variety of outlets, from traditional law reviews to digital humanities journals to specialty publications in law and economics. The project also created reuse-able digital integration process and research methods that can apply to other disciplines.
PI: Matt Wizinsky. Scholar domain subject: Design, College of Design, Architecture, Arts, and Planning.
Background and knowledge outcome aims:
Since 2015, the History Moves team has partnered with Chicago participants in the Women’s Interagency HIV Study (WIHS). Established in 1993, WIHS is the world’s longest running clinical research study on women living with HIV. As one of six original sites across the US, the Chicago program includes women who have been participating in the study for over 20 years.
The DSC assists scholars to create a digital platform for these women to curate, organize, and narrativize their own histories for a website and also a mobile exhibition to be presented at community centers, schools, and museums around the nation. The technical challenge lies in the fact that many of these women only have access to mobile devices, and some have no experience working with computers. The DSC’s technical team, therefore, develops a data visualization interface in Android or iOS to allow the women to arrange their oral history sound files and other media content into a personal digital narrative.
PI: Danny Wu and Brett Harnett. Scholar domain discipline: Information Science, Literature Studies, College of Arts and Sciences and College of Medicine.
Background and knowledge outcome aims:
As the sixth leading cause of death in the US, Alzheimer’s disease afflicts over 5.6 million Americans. The DSC uses digital technology and research methods to address the unique challenges and meet the communication needs of an aging society which are broad. Continued communication is essential for older adults and to delay cognitive decline. Older adults have reported using technology to stay in touch and communicate with their families, friends, neighbors, and even with lawyers and physicians. This project aims to understand the challenges faced by people with Alzheimer’s and further design an informatics solution in the form of a communication tool to address these challenges. Specifically, the project plans to collect posts from online health forums (e.g. eHealthForum) related to AD/ADRD and apply text mining and network analysis to draw topics from these posts. The topic network and the corresponding posts will be carefully reviewed by domain experts to summarize the challenges, which will inspire the design of an informatics solution with dedicated features to meet the user needs. Scholarly outcomes include a manuscript describing a computerized approach to summarize the challenges of a patient group, e.g. people with Alzheimer’s or related dementia, based on posts in online health forums. Prototyping for a patient tool or “translator” to align the medical vocabulary related to Alzheimer’s used by care providers, with the non-technical language of patients and their families as represented in the health forum analysis. The project team aims for this tool to help care providers communicate in a more compassionate and effective manner to patients and their families.
PI: Sarah Beal. Scholar domain subject: Children’s Foster Care Center, College of Medicine, and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center.
Background and knowledge outcome aims:
Over 415,000 children live in foster care in the US; 58% are from racial and ethnic minorities, disproportionately compared to the general population. Foster children have higher rates of health problems than their peers and frequently change healthcare providers. In collaboration with Hamilton County Job and Family Services, we provide healthcare to youth at the time of a placement change through a two-visit model to the Comprehensive Health Evaluations for Cincinnati’s Kids (CHECK) Center at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. Under the DSC’s guidance, using five years of existing structured and unstructured data gathered at the point of care delivery in the CHECK Center for 2787 youth ages 10–20, this project seeks to identify linguistic patterns extracted from clinical notes that could identify which young people seen in clinic are at risk for a placement disruption. These data have been linked to child welfare records from Hamilton County Job and Family Services in order to establish when placement disruptions have occurred. Using clinical notes from providers in the CHECK Center, the team of experts in child welfare, pediatrics, informatics, and data science, is well positioned to accomplish the scholarly outcomes include to identify shared characteristics of clinical notes unique to encounters occurring up to three months prior to a placement change, and to determine factors from the clinical note and structured fields that are most strongly associated with a placement change.
In summary, the DSC provides faculty across the university with support for digital knowledge creation, and integration from project conception, design and implementation. In the DSC’s catalyst role, the center stimulates new opportunities for digital scholarship in a cohesive academic center based in the university’s intellectual hub – the library – by assembling the multidisciplinary team technical capacity and expertise, space and computational equipment, access to datasets, and student and staff support.
In addition to the faculty’s participation and support, the DSC’s catalyst model has been gaining traction with the university’s senior leadership. Recently, the university announced a new strategic direction, with a platform with new building space specifically dedicated to accelerating innovation. Through this platform, the University decided to create a cohort of several transdisciplinary teams to be housed in a specially designed new facility dubbed the Digital Futures building. University senior leadership launched a competitive selection process to choose research teams that are truly interdisciplinary in nature, and with the vision and potential ability to work on grand challenges that our society faces today. The DSC was selected as one of the six anchor teams, the only humanity-centric team to be represented in Digital Futures building. The DSC’s catalyst model, its projects and the significant recognition it has received at the university and beyond, is an excellent example of what a library-based digital scholarship center can contribute in the fuller knowledge management scope from “explicit” knowledge to “tacit” knowledge, from knowledge creation to knowledge integration, and from “know-how” to “know-what”, and to the ultimate goals of seeking the “so-what” solutions for the 21st century’s grand challenges across the global communities.
Conclusion
This era of higher education calls for broad inter- and transdisciplinary learning and research. Universities strive to launch innovative initiatives from cutting edge teaching and research facilities, interdisciplinary academic institutes, and radical private and public partnerships to position organizations to take strategic positions in the increasingly competitive global higher education market. Libraries, created as a neutral knowledge hub on the campus since the inception of higher education, have also advanced themselves over the transformational changes in the 21st-century scholarly communication landscape. Libraries must seize the opportunity to re-position themselves as an emerging digital knowledge integrator across all disciplines. This new role aligns well with the full scope of KM. Today libraries continue playing an essential role in managing the “explicit” knowledge – the long-standing collection-centric services. Libraries also may play an emerging role in managing “tacit” knowledge, moving towards knowledge-centric services, such as the new roles illustrated in the two cases of the University of Notre Dame and University of Cincinnati Digital Humanities and Digital Scholarship Center. We hope that this essay, as well as those case examples, may offer some ideas and stimulate discussions for academic and research libraries around the world.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
