The third major component of IC is related to the organization’s relation- ships and ability to deal with its stakeholders. This component of IC might be called relational capital (RC), customer capital, market capital or net- work capital (Table 3). In spite of the variety of terms used to describe it, RC is seen as a crucial component of IC in organizations.
The university library’s RC can be described as the library’s relations and ability to deal with customers, suppliers and other stakeholders either within the university or with other actors outside the university. The university library’s relational capital also includes the library’s internal relations.
The library’s stakeholders can be viewed as partners. This provides a new perspective that helps to make the nature of customer relations that are based on loyalty and continuity more understandable. Because partners have a joint interest in value creation and in each other’s success, they must learn to trust in a joint future despite occasional mistakes and shortcomings without looking for new service providers when dissatisfied (see e.g. Siess, 2003; Huotari & Iivonen, 2004). The partnership may add to the library’s visibility within the university and an understanding among all of its con- stituencies of its strategic impact on the university’s IC.
Teaching information literacy might represent an area of the library’s RC and its relations and ability to deal with university teachers, researchers and students. Although the academic faculty is mainly responsible for teaching, the library has a crucial role as a partner in teaching information literacy and supporting network-based teaching. This partnership may improve the overall performance of the university (for example, by increasing the efficiency of the system, it may decrease the time spent studying prior to
graduation). However, this requires internal networking and crossing organizational boundaries. Success in collaboration is determined by the university library’s and the university’s strategic linking capability, and this may vary from unit to unit within the university,
Publishing is also the major area of research activity at the university which demands that the library is able to deal with other internal actors. It is an essential part of scholarly communication which is impossible without the academic community. Researchers make their expert knowledge avail- able for use and further development through scholarly communication.
The libraries could contribute to publishing in at least the following ways:
Participating in teaching scientific communication for degree students and researchers.
Publishing doctoral dissertations, journals and monographs in print and in digital forms. Electronic publishing in general is a field of activity in which libraries can collaborate effectively within their universities and as the partners produce joint value with other internal stakeholders. For example, the delivery of the latest research findings in the form of elec- tronic articles and reports could have an impact on the growth of the discipline. However, this requires close collaboration with the customers because the impact of such publication depends on the nature of the discipline.
Promoting the benefits of open access (OA) publishing as an alternative, faster channel for the publication of the latest findings. During the last years, open access publishing has gained quite a deal of visibility and this trend is likely to continue (seeBjo¨rk, 2004).
Training researchers and administrative staff to understand citation proc- esses in general and reading of citation indexes in particular.
Castellanos et al. (2004)considered which type of knowledge is needed as the drivers of university’s RC to its social environment. Similarly these drivers are needed in libraries to assure the transfer of the libraries’ RC to the academic community. Such drivers could be:
1. Knowledge of the information needs at the university level in general.
2. Knowledge about information-seeking behaviour of partners/customers.
3. Knowledge of collaboration and partnership building.
4. Knowledge of ways to develop the image and reputation of the library as a producer of valuable benefit to the university community.
In spite of the understanding that we all are already living in the era of the knowledge economy and that knowledge is a success factor in the whole
The University Library’s Intellectual Capital 93
society, universities still differ from many other organizations. Their main task is to add IC of the whole society, by producing and creating new knowledge through research and giving academic education at the highest level. The library can contribute to the university’s main task in a very profitable way, but its success in this area demands that information needs and information-seeking behaviour at the universities are understood by those who work in the library. However, knowing information needs and behaviour is not enough. Libraries have to collaborate with researchers, teachers and students and aim to improve their abilities to find relevant information to meet their needs. The library’s RC is manifested in its ability to build these kinds of partnerships.
CONCLUSION
In this article, our aim was to increase understanding of how the university library’s intellectual capital constitutes a part of the university’s intellectual capital. We described the human, structural and relational capital of the library. Furthermore, we discussed which kind of professional understand- ing and knowledge are needed at libraries as drivers to help integrate the library’s intellectual capital with that of the university.
We believe that the competence, capabilities and brainpower of the library staff are an essential part of the human capital of the whole university.
However, libraries have to be able to integrate their own knowledge with the human capital of the university. We described the many features of the library’s structural capital and suggested that the library itself can be un- derstood as one part of the structural capital of the whole university. We considered the library’s relational capital as the library’s relations and its ability to deal with customers, suppliers and other stakeholders.
Further research should focus on a more detailed examination of how to measure the university’s performance and outcomes, on indicating in detail how the library’s work impacts these critical issues, and how this impact could be measured. This type of examination will be important at a time when public funding for the universities is diminishing and the portion of external money required is increasing. The infrastructure of the universities, including libraries, has in many cases been funded from public sources, so declining public funding could lead to harmful limitation of the libraries’
operations with a simultaneous enlargement of research activities supported by external funding. Because universities are forced to achieve better
outcomes in teaching, learning and research, it is very important to dem- onstrate the role that the library plays in the growth of the university’s intellectual capital, performance and outcomes.
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