Knowledge Management In An Academic Environment

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    Knowledge Management In An Academic Environment - Presentation Transcript

    1. Knowledge Management in an Academic Environment
      Kimberly Silk, MLS
      Data Librarian
      October 20, 2009
    2. Agenda
      • What is the MPI, who works there, and a bit about our physical and digital collections
      • Where we started
      • What we built
      • Why it’s not quite right
      • What we learned
      • What we’re doing next
      • Q & A
    3. What We Do
      • We are an academic think tank that studies global prosperity in terms of location, place and city regions.
      Led by Director Richard Florida, we take an integrated view of prosperity, looking beyond economic measures to include the importance of quality of place and the development of people’s creative potential.
      We conduct relevant research to shape debate about economic prosperity and to inform private, public and civic decision-making.
      We’re located in the MaRS Centre at College & University
    4. Who We Are
      The Institute consists of:
      • Two senior researchers (Richard Florida & Kevin Stolarick)
      • Four-person “operations” team (Executive Director, Receptionist, Office Manager and Data Librarian)
      2-3 Post-Doctoral Fellows
      4-5 Research Assistants/Associates
      Various visiting faculty and researchers from other international institutions
      A growing community of international academics and young faculty who conduct research and teach in our area of interest.
    5. What We’ve Got
      A growing library of over 2600 volumes made up of books, journals, magazines and reports. This collection is housed in our library, which is non-circulating and managed separately from the UofT library system.
      A motley collection of approximately 500 GB of research data in various formats (excel, SAS, SPSS, Stata, plain text), journal articles, draft articles, white papers, etc.
      A shared network drive that continues to fill up with works in progress produced by the MPI team
      A variety of other documents and data sets that are collected on an ad-hoc basis from other institutions.
    6. How We Began our KM Journey
      It all started in June 2008…
      The immediate, urgent priority was to build a system to support a large project the MPI was developing for the Premier of Ontario (Ontario in the Creative Age report)
      We had a large team of 15 researchers who were working on various components to build one large report.
      Some where located in a single office, others were in other offices (but all within the city)
      We also had a series of 22 working papers being developed by 22+ academics that would be released following the OCA report.
    7. Requirements & Challenges
      Site must be secure and allow multi-level permissions
      Full-text search
      Multiple authors collaborating on a wide variety of document types: excel files, documents and PowerPoint slides
      The researchers wanted synchronous and asynchronous sharing – sometimes, but not always
      Version control was an issue; who was the last person to update a document? We needed to “roll back” to previous versions now and then
      The team needed to collaborate, but also be able to work without dependencies on other team members
      Team leaders needed to be able to publish interim versions of the report to show to the client for feedback.
    8. Our Quick & Dirty Evaluation Process
      We decided to find a solution would provide a “front end” to allow users to find what they needed, quickly. The files themselves would reside on a large 6 TB server acquired specifically for MPI’s growing data collection.
      We evaluated a variety of solutions: Dspace, SocialText, Octopz, InMagic Presto and SharePoint
      None provided an obvious solution, so we decided on the next best thing: good enough for right now.
    9. Short-term Solution: MS SharePoint (on the cheap)
      SharePoint comes in 2 versions:
      SharePoint Windows Shared Services (WSS)
      Included in Windows 2000 OS (free!)
      Basic document management
      No social media, content management, business intelligence, etc
      SharePoint 2007 (MOSS)
      Not free - $5000 plus $95 per user
      True content management, business intelligence, social media, forms wizard, user profile management, personalization, content syndication, powerful searching, reporting, and more.
      Consult http://www.sharepointprovider.com/moss-hosting/compare-wss-moss.asp for a useful at-a-glance comparison.
    10. The Verdict: SharePoint works … sort of
      What Works:
      Good integration w/ MS Office
      Web-based interface is available anywhere
      Version control
      Rolling back to previous versions
      Simple, easy to use interface
      What Doesn’t
      Requires users to log in repeatedly; no single-sign-on
      Dependent on IE browser; other browsers render the page incorrectly
      Limited features, especially when wanting to add feeds and other external content
      Heavy simultaneous use causes it to freeze;
      Users have to remember to access all their work via SP
      MS is NOT open source
    11. In the meantime, we tried these other tools … and we like them!
      EndNote for managing our citation libraries
      WordPress blogs for various side projects which are public (Music, Working Paper Series) and for our own internal play-space
      Wikis – Confluence, specifically – for managing walled garden projects
    12. What We Learned:
      Diving right into building a collaborative environment before getting a handle on organizing your information assets could be perceived as putting the cart before the horse….
      … but, you have to start somewhere
      Diving in without any planning or strategy provided us with a great way to learn about how we work, both online and offline
      Even though SharePoint was not completely successful, it did the job we needed it to do at the time
      And, we now know much more about our requirements and what we want our KM implementation to look like.
    13. Moving towards Social Knowledge Management
      Now that we know more, we’re ready to push further
      It’s not just about managing knowledge; it’s about managing the social interactions that create knowledge
      And, it’s about capturing that knowledge, making it accessible and able to be shared
      We also need to preserve “gold” versions, while allowing our team to create new iterations of these documents and data which represent creativity and innovation
      All of this, so that we may live long and prosper 
    14. What’s Next?
      We now have time to plan:
      We have a 6TB server containing a whole lotta files. We MUST get organized. Inventory has begun.
      We know that SharePoint isn’t the whole answer; it’s worth revisiting InMagic Presto and SocialText to re-evaluate their products in light of what I’ve learned in the past year
      I’m looking for a community of practice
      There are lots of corporate KM groups out there, but not many in the academic space
      I’m looking for a group of like-minded colleagues who want to explore with me
      Are you in?
    15. Thank You
      Kimberly Silk, MLS
      Kimberly.Silk@martinprosperity.org

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