Knowledge Management in Academic Libraries in Nigerian Universities: Way Forward.

Colleges and universities have significant opportunities to apply knowledge management practices to support every part of their mission. Knowledge management in universities can be applied in five key areas such as research, curriculum development, alumni services administrative services and strategic planning. Academic libraries are part of the university and its organizational culture. Whatever affects universities has an impact on academic libraries. As a result, role of academic libraries is voluminous to provide the competitive advantage for the parent organization. The success of academic libraries depends on their ability to utilize information and knowledge of their staff to better serve the needs of the academic community. In librarianship there is the creation, storage and collaborative sharing of employees' information within the academic library environment. In sharing and collaboration, a library's effectiveness and efficiency, productivity and profitability is enhanced. Knowledge Management is therefore the process of capturing, organizing, and storing information and experiences of workers and groups within an organization and making it available to others. It is used in this paper to refer to a process that focuses on five related library activities - capturing, classifying, exploiting, sharing, and applying both the explicit and the implicit know-how for the benefit of the library, librarians, the library users, and the academic community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]