Managing Intellectual Capital in Libraries: Beyond the Balance Sheet

In the knowledge economy, professionals have to make decisions about non-tangible, non-monetary, and largely invisible resources. Information professionals need to understand the potential uses, contributions, value, structure, and creation of broadly intangible intellectual capital in libraries. In order to fully realize intellectual capital in libraries, new practices and skills are required for library management practitioners and researchers.

Managing Intellectual Capital in Libraries provides research advances, guidelines, methods and techniques for managing intellectual capital in a library environment, and includes analyses and case studies. This book includes a foreword by Anne Woodsworth and is structured into seven chapters, covering: libraries in the knowledge economy; worlds of production and intellectual capital utilization in libraries; identifying and categorizing intellectual capital; measuring libraries’ intellectual capital; financial valuation and reporting of intellectual capital in libraries; and survival analysis for libraries’ intellectual capital resources. The book concludes with a summary, and turns the reader towards future research.

Practical methods and techniques are outlined that can be applied to real-life library situations, as they have been extensively applied in other economic sectorsProvides illustrative examples and case studies for exploring and explaining the meaning of specific intangible assets and resources in libraries, such as user oriented intangible assets, library system automation and technology, library location, human capital, external relations and moreConsiders libraries as intellectual capital within organizations and broader socioeconomic systems