Sharing of information and knowledge among staff in King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) library

This paper describes strategies and initiatives undertaken by the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) library in sharing information and knowledge among its staff. KAUST Library adopted several IT platforms to enable staff to contribute, share, collaborate, extract and act upon knowledge in order to serve our users better. They include: Sharepoint and Google Docs. As Duffy (2000) stated, that “success depends on capitalizing on every available resource including what a company knows and how it uses what it knows”. Therefore, to provide value-added services to our community of researchers and academicians, library staff needs to be equipped with the right skills and tools to be able to act upon users’ inquiries and information needs. KAUST library which was opened in Aug 2009 aims to support education and advanced scientific research. With its state of the art learning and information resource center, the library provides instructional assistance and reference services to its research and academic community. With the influx of information coupled the pervasive use of information technology and Web2.0, the library has to grapple with the issue of information overload. It is important to be able to sieve through the rubbles of information to apply the relevant ones during the point of transaction. Based on our experience in using various IT platforms, this paper will share the impacts of such tools. Lessons learnt and future directions in this area will also be discussed.