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to be emphasised in Tanzania public university libraries. E-mail mailing lists, wikis,
electronic bulletin boards, intranets, blogs, and other forms of groupware, such as webconferencing
systems are not well used by libraries. It may sound expensive to implement
these facilities, but in actual fact, these are some of the things library staff use in their daily
life. The emphasis on formal ways of knowledge sharing has rendered most technological
infrastructure underutilised. However, ICT facilities could have been used to facilitate
informal knowledge sharing and minimise costs. Library forums among other strategies for
knowledge sharing can be well facilitated by technology and reduce the cost of hosting
traditional library forums.
Etienne Wenger, one of the originators of the term communities of practice, suggests that
communities are not limited by formal structures. They create connections among people
across organizational and geographic boundaries. From this perspective, the knowledge of an
organization lives in a constellation of communities of practice, each taking care of a specific
aspect of the competence that the organization needs. He however suggests that the very
characteristics that make communities of practice a good fit for stewarding knowledge
(autonomy, practitioner-orientation, informality, crossing boundaries) are also characteristics
that make them a challenge for traditional hierarchical organizations (Wenger, 1998). When
cooperation among Tanzania University Libraries is promoted, communities of practice may
be easy to nurture.
When a forum is created for experts in different areas to meet, learning is likely to happen
even more than in seminars and meetings. The likely outcome is for these experts to start
communicating and learn from each other, thus gaining more knowledge. This is only more
possible when informal meetings are arranged. It is one way to enable staff to change the
environment through the opportunity for them to meet and exchange knowledge which in
turn will add value to the organisation. According to the findings none of the respondents
acknowledged the presence of informal meetings which are very crucial for knowledge
sharing as suggested in section 4.1.
Kai Hakkarainen in “communities of networked experts” presents an example of a successful
venture emerging out of informal knowledge sharing. An example of the power of informal
discussions according to Hakkarainen led to the development of one of the most successful
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