KM moves beyond the organization: The opportunity for librarians

KM is no ordinary management fad – first, it has legs, it is not fading away, and second it clearly is relevant to and overlaps greatly with librarianship. Despite the obvious overlap with librarianship, our field has done comparatively poorly on capitalizing on that overlap. The KM movement has gone through a number of stages, and it is now moving into a stage of recognizing the importance of and incorporating information and knowledge external to the parent organization. Such information and knowledge has always been the province of the librarian, and this development presents obvious and important opportunities for the field of librarianship, particularly in the area of the organization’s KM system design.