Knowledge Hub: A Knowledge Service Platform to Facilitate Knowledge Creation Cycle in a University

Abstract

In the internet era, faculty and students in a university could access various digital contents that their library may not purchase. On the one hand, this challenges a university library that conventionally plays the role as a content aggregator and distributor. On the other hand, this drives a university library to redefine its value proposition in knowledge service by leveraging its acquired resources. In this study, we present a living case of an initiative of knowledge service platform, Knowledge Hub (K-hub), developed by the Library of National Tsing Hua University (NTHU), Taiwan. K-hub aggregates intellectual outputs of faculty members to build knowledge maps and collaboration networks, and then each faculty can receive the recommended articles from the journals the university subscribes. Moreover, the library can promote the university by presenting the statistics of publications for the institutes in the university. Moreover, the library can refer the publications of a faculty to corresponding scholars in different research institutes around the world. We take the perspective of Service-Dominant Logic to elaborate the formation of the knowledge service system by integrating value from different stakeholders to co-create value, which represents the core value of a university library in knowledge management. The extended applications of K-hub are also discussed at the end of this article. The lesson learned from this case study benefits other universities in transforming their role for knowledge service.