LIBRARY IMPLICATIONS OF THE GROWING POWER OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY TO
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 THE STUDY’S BACKGROUND
Knowledge is a valuable resource in any institution or organization, whether academic, research, business, or industrial. Academics in institutions of higher learning have generated and communicated knowledge as information to other academics over the years. As noted by Ochu and Egbule (2005), knowledge generation has long been a source of concern for educational administrators, educators, and scholars in Nigeria.
African countries, including Nigeria, have been attempting to promote efficient methods of generating knowledge in order to transform their societies. The ability of tertiary institutions to develop ideas and effectively generate and communicate knowledge is critical to the realization of this noble idea. Knowledge, according to Bellinger, Castro, and Mills (2004), is an appropriate collection of information with the intent of being useful.
According to Ochu and Egbule (2005), knowledge is the information, understanding, and skills that an individual acquires through education and experience. Ali (2005), on the other hand, defined knowledge as verifiable and useful information obtained through research, opinions, evidence, or facts.
Knowledge can be defined as an opinion, facts, beliefs, or information obtained through research or review of existing literature and transferred from one party to another. Knowledge is typically classified as either explicit and formal or tacit and informal
(Nonaka, 1995, Davenport, 1998, Brooking, 1999). Tacit knowledge is personal or subjective knowledge that exists in the individual’s mind, is available to no one else, can be elicited from him through questions, or obtained through his private diaries, letters, and notes.
Explicit knowledge, on the other hand, is knowledge or ideas that can be shared with others for review (Brooking, 1999). This means that it can be verbally explained or preferably codified or written down in specific documents. With the codification of knowledge, it became possible to simplify and transfer general knowledge from one party to another.
Academics generate new knowledge through research and review of existing information, which is then discussed, evaluated, and sent to publishers for publication as books or journals. Books produced by this process are purchased by academics or by two libraries, which process, organize, store, and transmit information from one scholar to another, whereas journals are subscribed to by libraries and individual scholars.
This process is known as scholarly communication and is defined as “the system by which research and other scholarly writings (new knowledge) are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the scholarly community, and preserved for future use” (Association of College and Research Libraries, 2003).
Shaughnessy (1989:69) defined scholarly communication simply as “a social phenomenon in which intellectual and creative activity is passed from one scholar to another,” whereas Parekh (2000:154) defined it as “a process by which scholars convey their knowledge to, and exchange ideas with, each other and future generations.”
Scholarly communication, according to Case (2002:3), is “the process by which scholars and scientists conduct their research and make the results of their work known.”
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