A Theoretical Framework for Development of a Customer Knowledge Management System for Academic Libraries

Like any other organisations in today’s knowledge base economies, academic libraries are subject to constant changes. This is based on the changes of the environment surrounding them. The ability of these organizations to produce timely responses to these changes would enhance survival rate, growth, and competitive advantage. This paper focuses on providing an analytical tool that can both improve current services as well as creation of innovative services within academic libraries. By relying on the authors’ own experiences in managing academic libraries as well as expertise in knowledge management field, this paper proposes a conceptual framework for managing various knowledge-related activities specifically related to the customers’ knowledge in academic libraries. The proposed framework is called Customer Knowledge Management (CKM) and has two major components: (i) a generic integrated model for managing knowledge for academic library as a context for investigating customer knowledge management, and (ii) a methodology for integration of various types of customer knowledge in academic libraries in order to improve existing services and/or create new innovative services in academic libraries. 1 Associate Professor, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran ([email protected]) 2 Senior lecturer, Australian School of Business, University of New South Wales, Australia ([email protected]) 3 Professor, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran ([email protected])