Explain the functions of knowledge professionals. Give justification why library and information science professionals can be considered as knowledge professionals.

 The organization's success depends critically on a successful knowledge. Knowledge assets are the knowledge that an organization owns or needs to own to achieve its goals. Knowledge equals information, extracted, filtered or formatted in some way.

Knowledge can be divided into two types. They are tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge. Tacit knowledge consists of the hands-on skills, best practices, special know-how, heuristic, intuitions, and so on. Tacit knowledge is personal knowledge that is hard to formalize or articulate.The transfer of tacit knowledge is by tradition and shared experience, through for example, apprenticeship or job training. Tacit knowledge in an organization ensures task effectiveness -- that the right things are being done so that the work unit could attain its objectives. It also provides for a kind of creative robustness -- intuition and heuristic can often tackle tough problems that would otherwise be difficult to solve. Whereas tacit knowledge is implicit, explicit knowledge is rule-based knowledge that is used to match actions to situations by invoking appropriate rules. Explicit knowledge guides action by answering three questions: what kind of situation is this? What kind of person am I or What kind of organization is this? and finally, What does a person or an organization do in a situation such as this? Explicit knowledge is used in the design of routines, standard operation procedures, and the structure of data records. Explicit knowledge enables the organization to enjoy a certain level of operational efficiency and control. It also promotes equable, consistent organizational responses. Those forms of knowledge can be found in any organization. The organization however, is skilled at continuously expanding, renewing, and refreshing its knowledge in all categories. The organization promotes the learning of tacit knowledge to increase the skill and creative capacity of its employees and takes advantage of explicit knowledge to maximize efficiency. In effect, the organization has acquired a third class of knowledge - meta-knowledge- that it uses to create and integrate all its intellectual resources in order to achieve high levels of performance.

Knowledge professionals are the individuals in the knowledge center who have the skills, training and know-how to organize knowledge into systems and structures that facilitate the productive use of knowledge resources. They include librarians, records managers, archivists, and other information specialists. Their tasks include the representation of the various kinds of organizational knowledge; developing methods and systems of structuring and accessing knowledge; knowledge distribution and delivery; amplifying the usefulness and value of knowledge; knowledge storage and retrieval; and so on. Their general focus is to enhance the accessibility and quality of knowledge so that the organization will have an enlightened view of itself and its environment. The knowledge professionals design and develop knowledge products and services that promote learning and awareness; they preserve the organization's memory to provide the continuity and context for action and interpretation.

Librarians and information science professionalshave long been regarded as part of the support staff of the organization, working quietly in the background, often uninvolved in any of the critical functions of the organization. Information professionals have to recast their roles as an knowledge professional. In other words, librarians need to work as knowledge worker. Knowledge work is characterized by variety and exception rather than routine and is performed by professional or technical workers with a high level of skill and expertise. So those who excercise their intellects in any of these types of activities are knowledge workers. If librarian's work can be or is totally routinized, then they are an administrative worker(for example, gatekeeper), not a knowledge worker. That means that librarian's roles should be not limited to being the custodians or gatekeepers of information. Knowledge professionals will have to move from the background to the center of the organizational stage, to jointly hold the reins of knowledge management with users and the technology experts, to help steer and shape the knowledge policies, structures, processes, and systems that will nurture organizational learning. Knowledge professionals should be able to extract, filter and disseminate vital external knowledge. They also will design and develop workgroup application suites that are effectively platforms for knowledge management. Finally, they will work side by side with users in collecting and analyzing strategic intelligence; and to act as trainers and consultants who transfer knowledge gathering and research skills throughout the organization.  

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