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Best practices have helped business companies double their profit. The examples of an
account for success achieved by Buckman Laboratories are presented by Harvard Business
Review. One of the things they did was send out its PhDs to gather best business practices
worldwide and then share with all associates in the company. This as it was for Buckman
Laboratory may be expensive for many libraries but best practices include also learning to
add value more economically. In libraries, exchange of staff may be affordable and will
achieve much the same results. Buckman reported a profit of 100% after the introduction of a
formal system to share and capture knowledge within and outside the company. They used
technology to capture how problems were solved and reused the solutions to save more time,
and greater efficiency was achieved. See (Fulmer,1999).
Best practices scored very high responses from respondents, that is 71% (15 of 21
respondents). However, most of those who mentioned sharing best practices also mentioned
meetings organised by The Tanzania Libraries Association as an example where they share
best practices. This is perhaps one of the initiatives the Tanzania Libraries Association needs
to be complimented for. On the other hand, when we try to see examples from those
companies which realised increased productivity through best practices there is so much to
learn. When we see the efforts done for instance by Buckman Laboratory, BP, Singapore
Government and other examples mentioned in different knowledge sharing literature, we can
already predict that best practices are exercised at a very marginal scale in Public University
Libraries of Tanzania See examples in Buckman laboratory (A) found in Fulmer(1999),
Knowledge sharing practices in Asian institutions (Chaudhry, 2005), see the implementation
of kinetics in Buckman laboratories as presented in (Fulmer, 1999).
Best practices imply learning from those who are more successful. It is more of a company‟s
efforts which are in the very best position to access which kind of lessons are likely to be
more useful to their situation from those who are more successful. The nature of these kinds
of meeting by TLA is far from addressing any specific problem pertaining to a particular
library, rather to providing information and at times to find a solution to a particular problem.
In these meetings one person or two will be representing the library and then waiting for
another meeting may be in six months time. If then the TLA‟s meetings are the core platform
for the best practices, it means very little is done regarding best practices due to the fact that
the meetings are not very frequent.
Sending different library staff to those libraries with outstanding records in particular kind of
activities could have improved the best practices in Tanzania University Libraries. From the
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