2012 Best Practices for Government Libraries

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BEST PRACTICES 2012
Librarians Wanted to Help Create Innovative and Interactive Solutions for
Smart Government
By Ken Wheaton, Systems Librarian, Alaska State Court Law Library; 2012 President SLA
PNW, and Art Murray, CEO of Applied Knowledge Sciences, Co-director of the Enterprise of
the Future Program at the George Washington University Institute for Knowledge and
Innovation
In our recent series on the Knowledge Librarian in KMWorld we talked about why smart
cities need smart libraries. We envisioned the smart city having a “brain” which acts as a
“central clearinghouse for connecting people, creating social cohesion and enabling
sustained economic growth through knowledge.” 1 The smart city springs from the
massive shift in the world’s economy from agriculture to industry to information and now,
to a knowledge-based economy.
This presents a tremendous opportunity for libraries and librarians to make the transition
from information providers to knowledge brokers. This is not unlike what the World Bank
experienced a few years back when its Director at the time, James Wolfensohn,
announced that the Bank’s greatest value as an institution was not so much the large
sums of money it had, but rather its even greater treasure trove of knowledge. Similarly,
libraries can undergo a transformation not seen since the turn of the last century when
Andrew Carnegie introduced the “open stacks” design enabling people to browse and
discover books on their own.
One place to begin this transformation is in government. Most of today’s government
organizations are artifacts of an age in which government was basically an arbitrator of
transactions, hence the heavy emphasis on documents and records which can be found in
every agency and more recently in data.gov. While providing improved access to all of
this data by ordinary citizens is certainly applauded, we haven’t even scratched the
surface regarding how to use that data in a beneficial way. For that we need knowledge,
which brings us back to the smart library and the smart librarian.
To illustrate, consider that a key aspect of what differentiates knowledge from information
is the ability to “connect the dots” in ways that reduce redundant or conflicting efforts
aimed at achieving the same goal. Nowhere is this problem more prevalent than in
government.
For example, 2007 Census data show that the United States has a total of 39,044 units of
local general purpose government, which includes 19,492 separate municipal government
organizations. Most of these units are still based on 19 th -century governance laws and tax
systems.
The vast majority of local governments claim to be under-resourced. Yet all too often,
their own self-interest prevents them from looking beyond their boundaries for resources
that can be shared. We’re not talking about financial resources, but rather knowledge
resources. Out of those 39,044 units, how much knowledge-sharing is actually going on?
If one organization solves a problem or comes up with a better way of doing something,
how many of the other 39,043 will have access to that knowledge? Or more likely, how
many of them will end up going through the same process of trial-and-error or
“reinventing the wheel” while attempting to achieve the same result?