Knowledge Management Practices: Catalyst for Development of University Libraries in Kenya
##article.abstract##
In the knowledge economy era, the library should become a fortune of human knowledge, participate in knowledge innovation, and become an important link in the knowledge innovation chain. The purpose of this paper is to provide the relevance of integrating knowledge management (KM) practices into the libraries core business functions. This paper gives the relationship between KM practices and the libraries. It further displays modern librarian‟s role in knowledge management and finally recommends key strategies to be adopted by universities to support growth and development of this important tool of the institutions; the Libraries. Through a literature review based analysis, the paper tries to address the question „how do we maximize knowledge management practices in developing our libraries? This research was undertaken in 20 university libraries in Kenya using an online survey questionnaire to investigate the current practices in different libraries in Kenya to discover whether the Librarians are aware of KM and if their libraries are practising KM. This survey results shows that 76% of the Librarians have good understanding of KM. On the contrary the findings shows that most libraries don‟t have appropriate KM Training & Mentoring programs with only 12% respondent admitting that their libraries have good programs in place.
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