ABSTRACT
Developing and Building Awareness of Tools for E-scholarship and Knowledge Management The development of an online, Web-based information environment has affected academic libraries by breaking down traditional notions of the library as the sole “gateway to information” and holder of the university’s complete store of information and knowledge. With the increasing availability of academic resources and tools on the Internet that are being used by faculty to share discipline-based knowledge and information, the library may be seen as one part of a widely dispersed infrastructure that may include university-based elements and Internet-based elements: “the reality of our information ecosystems today is that they are not closed systems but open ones: no university, for example, generates and controls all of the information that is important to its faculty, students, or staff” (Unsworth, 2008, p. 231). These external, Internet-based resources that are easily findable through Google and other search engines include articles, periodicals, and books, video and audio, discipline-based repositories such as arXiv.org, learning object repositories such as MERLOT, and the like. In addition information retrieval and networking tools such as blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, link managers, Twitter, and social networking sites are being used by faculty and students to share information and stay connected. Citation management and sharing tools such as Zotero, CiteULike, and Connotea have become important knowledge management tools for scholars and students to manage their resources and share them with others. BitApp, developed by the University of Wisconsin Madison Libraries, shows the potential of a knowledge management tool relying on pulling together distributed information sources to show the research interests of individuals and groups as well as trends in research interests, and to connect individuals with similar interests (Unsworth, 2008).
