Collaborative knowledge creation in the higher education academic library

Abstract

Collaboration has become a core competency of the 21st century workforce. Thus, the need of collaboration is reshaping the academic library in higher education to produce competent future workforce. To encourage collaboration in the academic library, knowledge commons that integrate technology to infrastructure and system furniture are introduced. The article examines college students’ collaborative activities for knowledge creation at a university academic library via a survey, using the theory of organizational knowledge creation. It analyzed student group activities, based on the four types of activities in knowledge creation. A total of 385 undergraduate students completed the survey. The survey results indicated that the most frequent group activity is individual-oriented activity, followed by socialization activity, creating contents as a group, and group learning activity. However, when analyzed by frequent activities by the same users, the majority of users were doing all four activities, followed by individual-oriented activity only, and individual-oriented and socialization activities. The results revealed different trends in the engagement of the four knowledge creation activities between knowledge workplace and the academic library. Several implications to encourage collaborative activities are suggested.