Knowledge management and information management

Except some commentators who believe that KM is nothing more than information management (Wilson, 2002), there is a general agreement within the literature that information management is one of the most important component of knowledge management. The distinct difference between KM and IM is that the focus of KM is in not only external but also internal knowledge. People (both employee and customer) are very important in KM practice." in broad terms, KM shares IM's user perspective-a focus on valuse as a function of user satisfaction rather than the efficiency of the technology that houses and delivers the information" (Prusak, 2001). Grey (1998) made a distinction, that is, "working with objects (data or information) is information management and working with people is knowledge management."

How do you effectively share knowledge and expertise that's grown within an organization? That's never been part of what a librarian has been asked to look at. (Foy as quoted by DiMattia & Oder, 1997)

Forman sees KM as part of a shift in librarian consciousness: "if we remain in the 'we design and they will come and use' tradition of librarianship, we will fail. Everything has to be user-defined and librarians should build around that."(DiMattia & Oder, 1997)

The results of a study by Gu (2004) indicate that. after entering the 21st century, the development of KM research is much more remarkable than that of IM. KM has been leading IM in both publication productivity and academic population and tendency is overwhelmingly growing.