Knowledge management practices in Nigerian university libraries

Abstract

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine the state of knowledge management practices in Nigerian university libraries, using the knowledge management processes of creation, capturing, organisation, sharing, use and storage. 

Methodology: Survey research design was used for the study with a population consisting of Nigerian university librarians who were harvested from various library online platforms. Data was elicited using questionnaire, which was an adaptation of the Knowledge Management Assessment Instrument (KMAI) developed by Chin-Loy (2007) that divides knowledge management practices into six dimensions with construct reliability of 0.89 Alpha. The questionnaire was converted to an online survey, elicited data for a period of three weeks, after which 78 responses were retrieved and subjected to descriptive analysis.

 Findings: All the six dimensions of knowledge management practices showed a high level, with knowledge organisation having the highest mean score, while knowledge creation had the least mean score.  Of the 30 items across all six dimensions, the result showed that the item with the highest mean was from the knowledge organisation dimension which states that the university libraries use standard rules in cataloguing and classifying information materials. In general, the knowledge management practices in Nigerian University libraries were found to be high with a grand mean of 3.02.

Research limitations: Investigating knowledge management practices using the knowledge management processes without examining the knowledge systems and the people as part of the knowledge management posses as a limitation to this present study. Also, social desirability bias due to the nature of the measuring instrument and convenience sampling type of non-probability sampling technique adopted for the study, are all limitations which should be taken into consideration in future research.

Originality/value: The study contributes to the scarce empirical investigation of the state of knowledge management practices in libraries generally, and Nigerian university libraries in particular.