Book

Description

South African public libraries experience a rapid technological transformation that compel them to change their traditional way of rendering services. These libraries are forced to implement a new emerging library service that will accommodate the digital needs of the spectrum of users in their communities. This emerging library services is known as Knowledge Commons. Knowledge Commons can be described as “a practice of creating and sharing of information, data, knowledge, science, and other types of intellectual and cultural resource collectively owned and managed, particularly over the World Wide Web” Hess & Ostrom. Knowledge Commons mostly interchanged with information commons, digital commons, internet commons, among others, and they all have minor technical differences. Knowledge is a common resource that is ‘non-rivalrous and non-excludable’ because any user can consume it and yet it is not depleted. Therefore, Knowledge Commons is easily realized when human knowledge is cast in a non-rivalrous manner and made accessible to users through the internet and open access. This study provides how Knowledge Commons offers users a way of accessing a shared knowledge published using digital resources. The end-result imply that the new information technologies have redefined knowledge communities, altered the traditional world of information users and information providers, made archaic many of the existing norms, rules, regulations, policies, and laws and have also led to astonishing outcomes. Also, issues addressed included the combination of information technology, library, librarians and the community that the library serves in a seamless co-dependence manner that influences both library content and services.