Knowledge enhancement and sharing practices of Library staff of tertiary institutions in Northern Ghana: The role of management

The current knowledge era has shifted the way information is transmitted by librarians to users. This change has put more demands on library staff to be knowledgeable in information acquisition, processing, storage and distribution to intended users. Knowledge management in libraries will be a panacea to library staff inefficient service delivery. There have been several studies on knowledge management in academic libraries but none of the studies has focused on the knowledge enhancement practices of library staff in Ghana. This study investigated the knowledge enhancement and sharing practices among staff of tertiary institutions in Northern Ghana. The researchers intended to achieve the following research objectives: to investigate the role management play in staff knowledge enhancement and sharing, find out staff knowledge enhancement practices and finally, to find out staff sharing practices. The researcher adopted quantitative method for the study and questionnaire was used to take responses from 53 librarians of four tertiary institutions located in Northern Ghana. The data from the respondents were analyzed using SPSS. The findings of the study revealed that management of tertiary institution libraries play significant role in the knowledge development of staff. They play this important role by allowing staff to go on further studies, organising in-service training for the staff, providing funding for staff to attend workshops at other institutions, providing career guidance to staff by advising them and putting staff into work groups such that inexperienced staff will learn from the experienced staff. Also, knowledge enhancement practices of staff were revealed to include reading of relevant materials, learning from experienced staff, and formation of learning teams, on-the-job learning, attending workshops and watching online tutorials. The study again showed how staff share knowledge among themselves through learning from the experienced staff, forums for knowledge sharing, workshops for staff and sharing knowledge among work team members. Based on the findings of the study, it was recommended that relevant reading materials should be provided by management for staff reading and knowledge enhancement purposes, more learning forums should always be organised for staff to interact with each other and finally, knowledge management as an activity should be formalized in the libraries such that there will be knowledge management policies guiding knowledge activities in the library.