Think Clearly Blog

Embedded information professionals share their expertise across the enterprise—which benefits from increased awareness of internal resources and projects. Embedded special librarians add value by bridging information silos while disseminating information throughout the organization.

During our “KM Conversation” with knowledge management evangelist and expert Stan Garfield, “Gamification Accelerates KM Adoption,” he focused on how you can use gamification techniques to crack the challenging problem of building user engagement and ensuring that your KM platform is vibrant and widely leveraged within your organization.

Museums are now expected to have an online presence. At first, this meant museums needed a website with information about their hours of operation. Later, it meant museums should publish content and information about current and permanent exhibits. Now, the expectation is that museums have a digital presence for all artifacts.

The American College of Surgeons (ACS) is a scientific and educational association of surgeons that was founded in 1913 to improve the quality of care for the surgical patient by setting high standards for surgical education and practice. The College Archives, located in the headquarters building in Chicago, collects and preserves inactive College records of enduring value and makes them available for research to its members and to the general public.

In my current book on promoting knowledge management initiatives within the corporate world, I offer a collection of practical tips and techniques that can help your KM program thrive. High performing communities are essential to KM success. I have developed 10 principles for KM practitioners to keep in mind as they build and participate in communities.

There’s no one model for libraries, archives and museums to coexist and interact. Each entity can be a stand-alone repository, a mixture of two entities, or contain all three entities. Library, Archive, and Museum (LAM) professionals are trained in organizing and categorizing items in their respective collections. Since this is their specialty they’ve applied the same principles to classify LAM entities separately, due to the LAM's slightly different functions and collection materials.

People who need people may indeed be the luckiest people in the world, but if you depend on others in order to do your job successfully, you’re going to need a strategy that embraces both daily partnership and situational independence.

Archives and special collection development policies should state what the organization currently holds and the collecting areas, especially records of enduring value that represent the organization's history. A policy will not only formalize the archives program, it will allow you to focus on what you would like to acquire as well as to disregard materials that fall outside of the collection. Focusing on what you will not collect will also allow you to deaccession materials that should not be in the collection.

In his recent Law.com post, 5 Steps for Beginners to Implement a Knowledge Management System, Zach Warren gives an overview of a KM session he attended during 2018’s CLOC (Corporate Legal Operations Conference) in April. He joined the beginners portion of the session, led by KM experts from Baker McKenzie and Cisco, whose recommendations are just as relevant outside the legal sector.

Grant writing can be a complicated and intensive process. Each grant application will have a different emphasis and process to follow, and if you’re new to grant writing, it can be intimidating. While all grants are different, there are aspects that remain the same. From the dozens of grants I’ve written, read, and edited, I’ve compiled the top 8 tips to a bulletproof proposal.

Embedded special librarians are contributing members of their departments or groups. They are in the thick of things, participating fully in the development of projects, integration of new services, or dissemination of materials and information throughout the organization and its clientele.

Over the years, I have directed or have been a subject matter expert on a number of projects using born-digital and digitized cultural heritage materials. With each new experience, I have gathered a series of questions, an aide-mémoire, to be explored before commencing a digital initiative.