Intellectual Capital and Public University Libraries: A Knowledge Sharing Perspective

Knowledge economy is resulting into competition which increases the demand for innovation. The wave has urged libraries which faced no competition before to think of ways to add and show more value to its users. The coming of digital libraries and other information providers challenges traditional libraries to improve its practices before becoming obsolete. This paper is based on the findings from the research for the Master thesis focused on establishing the relationship between intellectual capital and knowledge sharing. It is an explanatory survey addressing the issue of intangible assets as unseen value in public libraries. The research intended to use both a questionnaire and interview to ensure validity. A questionnaire was designed in such a way that key questions were asked alternatively in the same questionnaire to compensate the interview which its feasibility was constrained by time and distance. The questionnaire was then administered to six different universities to ensure reliability of the findings. As a consequence of distance and difficulties in selecting respondents, snowball sampling was used. Descriptive narrative and mapping were then used to explain the findings. Due to time and distance constraints the research focused only on the aspect of human capital and structural capital and leaves such aspects as customer capital, renewal capital and process capital to be covered by other researchers.