Communities of Practice in Academic Libraries at University of

Puerto Rico: redefining practice from withinDr. José Sánchez-Lugo

Dra.Julia VélezUniversity of Puerto Rico

16th International Conference on LearningBarcelona, Spain

What we will share…

• UPR background information

• Briefly describe evaluation project

• Explain Communities of Practice Initiative

• Share research findings

• Founded in 1903

• Most prestigious university in Puerto Rico

• Over 60 thousand students

• More than 5,000 faculty

University of Puerto Rico Eleven Campuses

Three research centers

Diez para la Década (Ten for the Decade)

• Systemic effort to develop and implement the UPR strategic plan.

• Accreditation to enhance the quality of all academic programs and units.

• Academic libraries-Association for College and Research Libraries partnership.

Develop a systemic assessment culture

Communities conceptualized

• CoP are social structures formed by “people who share a passion for something they do and learn to do it better through a sustained interaction” (Wenger, 2001)

• Domain, Community and Practice

Research questions• In what ways could communities of practice

contribute to modify institutional culture in a higher education setting?

• What has been the contributions of the CoP to the operation and services of the system’s libraries.

• Which elements can be identified as success factors for CoP at the UPR?

• Which strategies of knowledge capture and dissemination seem more appropriate and effective in the context of higher education?

Research Design

• “an empiric research examines a contemporary phenomenon within its real life context, especially when the boundaries between phenomenon and context are not clearly evident (...)”(Yin, 1994)

Case Study Units of Analysis

• Contributions of CoP’s• Success factors of the

CoP’s• Effective knowledge

management practices in CoP’s

• Influences organizational culture in institutions of higher education

Selected Findings

• Contributions of the Communities of Practice- individual learning and professional development - increased collaboration and network development with Web 2.0 tools

Selected Findings

• “When I talk with my community fellows I tell them…we will not necessarily complete the tasks before us, maybe the project or the initiative will end…but we will continue. We have developed links that will not end with the project…we must continue”.

Selected Findings

• Contributions of the Communities of Practice- at the organizational level new practices and services were developed.- changes in library operations, increased infusion of collaborative tools and Web 2.0 technologies for information services- collaboration in electronic collection development- systemic virtual reference and portal redesign project

Why were the communities successful?

• Institutional support• Volunteer participation• Non hierarchical ,

horizontal• Information flow within

the community• Facilitators were not

“committee leaders”

Good Practices in knowledge management

• Information Technologies (Blogs, Wikis, Facebook , e-mail, Real Simple Syndication and Slide Share)

• Intercommunity exchanges documented in minutes and agreements, intercampus visits

• Audio and video recordings (some published in Facebook , and You Tube)

• “we knew early on that face to face meetings would be difficult so we decided to use a tool that would allow us to meet online like Skype. We also used blogs and Facebook.”

• “if there is one thing we should have documented more is the way we decided to integrate technologies. What happened from the moment we began to explore a technology to the time we decided to integrate it in our work.”

Influence in Organizational Culture

• Relationship to the university

• More effective working arrangement

• Recognition of Library Director’s Board

• Increased visibility of librarians as innovative academics.

Conclusions

• Understanding and promotion of academic libraries as places of learning and knowledge creation.• CoP as an organizational development strategy can be valuable to promote creativity and innovation within an institution of higher education.•Although collegial decision making processes, knowledge sharing and peer collaboration are inherent to the concept of university, developed bureaucracies hinder their capability to comply with their mission.

jose.sanchez18@upr.edujuvelez@upr.edu

www.slideshare.net/jasanchez