St. John's News

The traditional role of libraries is evolving rapidly from being collectors of information to managing expertise and knowledge in forming partnerships, says Linda Stoddart, Ph.D., head of the Dag Hammarskjöld Library and Knowledge Sharing Centre at the United Nations.

Dr. Stoddart, who was appointed to her current position in 2004, will bring her expertise in information management and knowledge sharing to St. John’s University for the Annual Gillard Lecture, hosted by the Division of Library and Information Science, on Monday, April 14th, at 6:15 p.m. in St. Augustine Hall. The title of her presentation will be “The Changing Role of Information Professionals: Some Examples from the United Nations.”

Recognized internationally as an expert in information management and knowledge sharing, Dr. Stoddart spent most of her career in Europe but returned to the United States four years ago to take the job with the UN, where she is also Chair of the Task Force on Knowledge Sharing. She says that the traditional role of the Dag Hammarskjöld Library has been to serve the staff and delegates of the Permanent Missions to the UN but in recent years, that’s changed. The Library is working with a network of more than 400 depository libraries—university, national, public, and parliamentary—that they help, the UN Library director explains, “by partnering with them to disseminate information, not just collect it, and to spread access to all kinds of information, including expertise and knowledge.

“We’re not just providing documents anymore,” she says emphatically.

Knowledge management is not a discipline per se, according to Stoddart. “It’s a way of looking at intangibles, of facilitating and sharing expertise that can bring innovative change.”

“We have a slogan,” she continues, ‘Moving from collections to connections,’ depicting not only the evolution to electronic information, but also giving a new focus to the promotion of communities, encouraging and facilitating networking, and bringing people together.”

Additionally, Stoddart reports, the Hammarskjöld Library is forming a virtual community with UN regional offices. While in the past these offices each had their own intranet sites, a policy was implemented to ensure that all offices in the UN Secretariat around the world would be linked through the same intranet, called iSeek. Stoddart and her staff facilitated the migration from these intranet sites to iSeek, which is managed by the UN internal communications unit based in the Hammarskjöld Library in New York. “We’re creating community this way,” she notes.

But that’s not all that the information specialist and her staff are working on at present. They’re taking the lead in helping to coordinate programs and policies of the other libraries in the UN system. “Networking has become a core activity, worldwide,” says Stoddart.

Many challenges remain and there is a need for transformation. She notes that information specialists are now going from being “gatekeepers to facilitators” and warns that those in the profession or those thinking about a career in information science shouldn’t be thinking just “information or documents and books.”

Stoddart says that the importance of gathering and sharing information, using it to move an organization forward, is resonating with businesses and not-for-profits and she reports that some companies (Microsoft is one) have actually created the position of Chief Knowledge Officer. “It’s an extremely important position,” she notes “It has to do with encouraging collaboration, working together, creating communities of practice and making better use of organization’s know-how.”

Other growing areas in the information field are web content management, intranet site management, and web governance.

Assuredly, it’s a good time to be in the profession, the Head of Dag Hammarskjöld says. “There are lots of opportunities in all sorts of fields—government, not-for-profit, academia—that can use these kinds of skills in accessing information, understanding how different professions use information and knowing how information and knowledge play a role in decision-making in a business or profession.”

We all have to face innovation and change, Stoddart concludes. “We have to look beyond the library walls. We have to understand the importance of information and how it and knowledge play a role in understanding organizational culture and developing strategies for success.”