The Status of Knowledge Management in the Libraries of Selected Medical Sciences Universities in Tehran City: Using Bukowitz and Williams Model

As a foundation of acquiring, retrieving, processing, storing, and distributing knowl-edge and information, libraries are considered an essential communication link in the knowledge management (KM) chain in universities. Therefore, the present study aimed to investigate KM status in the libraries of selected medical sciences universities in Tehran city using the Bukowitz and Williams’s model.

This is an applied research with a descriptive survey method. A researcher-made question-naire was used to collect data, the validity of which was calculated using the opinions of experts, and its reliability was estimated using Cronbach’s alpha coefficient. The study population included 153 managers and librarians of central, faculty, and hospital libraries of Tehran, Iran, and Shahid Beheshti Universities of Medical Sciences. To analyze the data, descriptive statistics, and to compare the mean obtained for each component with the standard score, a one-sample t-test with a significance level of 0.05 was used.

The study results revealed that the mean score of KM status in the libraries of medi-cal sciences universities in Tehran based on Bukowitz and Williams’s model was 144.85, which is above average. Also, among the studied components, using knowledge, learning knowledge, contributing to knowledge, and divesting knowledge are above average, and building/sustaining knowledge was average, and knowledge assessing and getting were below average.

In general, the findings indicated that the KM status based on the Bukowitz and Williams’s model in the libraries of selected medical sciences universities in Tehran is desirable. Therefore, according to previous studies in comparison with this study, it can be concluded that KM in the libraries of selected medical universities in Tehran is progressing.AbstractJournal of Medical Library and Information ScienceRecieved: 12 Nov 2020Accepted: 8 Jan 2021IntroductionVol. 2, 2021age this organizational knowledge and contribute to it among their staff. The task of knowledge management (KM) is to manage the knowledge capital of any organization. KM is defined as how an organization builds, sustains, and contrib-utes to knowledge to improve its efficiency and effective-ness (1). KM includes all the methods that an organization manages its knowledge assets and includes: know-how, get/acquire, store, employ, apply/use, update, and create knowl-edge (2). Given the growing importance of knowledge in in-CrossMarkOriginal articledoi.org/10.22037/jmlis.v2i.33234This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.