Knowledge Management: Historical and Cross‐Disciplinary Themes

Citation

Smith, K. (2008), "Knowledge Management: Historical and Cross‐Disciplinary Themes", Library Management, Vol. 29 No. 8/9, pp. 823-823. https://doi.org/10.1108/01435120810917611

How many more titles do we need on knowledge management (KM), I wondered as I received yet another to read? It is an interesting field and not without its controversy and I have been looking for a “text” on the subject to recommend to students. This title could be that book.

Author Danny Wallace's reason for the book is “to link current and historical works of importance to the development and understanding of knowledge management across domains and disciplines” (p. 2). Thank you Danny Wallace. Up until now I have found that the only way to do this is to give students a long list of readings; readings from books that are expensive to purchase and for which there are never enough copies in the library, and from numerous journal articles. We now have a compendium of selected key pieces from the KM literature for students to appraise and use as they form their own views of what KM means to them and how they think it might impact on their work as future information professionals.

Wallace holds a PhD in library science and is a professor in the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Oklahoma. His primary research and teaching interests lie in the areas of informetrics, informatics, information science, human‐computer interaction, knowledge‐based systems, and information storage and retrieval. This book is the second entry in a book series on knowledge management for which he is Consulting Editor.

His teaching and research experiences support his approach to the topic. He uses seminal papers from the KM literature across a range of fields to aid his discussion on the matters they present: on the nature of knowledge, knowledge capital, learning in an organizational context, knowledge sharing and communities of practice, knowledge representation, content management, taxonomies and ontologies, and informatics and information technology. Wallace has been quite methodological in choosing the papers to include. They were selected on the basis of citation frequency, assessment of historical precedent and uniqueness of viewpoint (pp. 6‐7). In his words: “the book is intended for all students of knowledge management …who wish to place the field in context” (p. 7).

This title is a welcome addition to the growing collection of titles on knowledge management. My only misgiving is that my students will use it exclusively and not form their own views and pathways as we progress though this controversial topic. But I am willing to take that risk. After all, I will have read it too.