Presentation at International Conference on Learning

1. Communities of Practice in
Academic Libraries at University of
Puerto Rico: redefining practice
from within
Dr. José Sánchez-Lugo
Dra.Julia Vélez
University of Puerto Rico
16th International Conference on Learning
Barcelona, Spain

2. What we will share…
• UPR background
information
• Briefly describe
evaluation project
• Explain Communities of
Practice Initiative
• Share research findings

3. • Founded in 1903
• Most prestigious
university in Puerto Rico
• Over 60 thousand
students
• More than 5,000 faculty

4. University of Puerto Rico
Eleven Campuses
Three research centers

5. Diez para la Década
(Ten for the Decade)
• Systemic effort to
develop and implement
the UPR strategic plan.
• Accreditation to
enhance the quality of
all academic programs
and units.
• Academic libraries-
Association for College
and Research Libraries
partnership.

6. Develop a systemic assessment culture

9. Communities conceptualized
• CoP are social
structures formed by
“people who share a
passion for something
they do and learn to do
it better through a
sustained interaction”
(Wenger, 2001)
• Domain, Community
and Practice

10. Research questions
• In what ways could communities of practice
contribute to modify institutional culture in a higher
education setting?
• What has been the contributions of the CoP to the
operation and services of the system’s libraries.
• Which elements can be identified as success factors
for CoP at the UPR?
• Which strategies of knowledge capture and
dissemination seem more appropriate and effective
in the context of higher education?

11. Research Design
• “an empiric research examines a
contemporary phenomenon within its real life
context, especially when the boundaries
between phenomenon and context are not
clearly evident (...)”(Yin, 1994)

12. Case Study Units of Analysis
• Contributions of CoP’s
• Success factors of the
CoP’s
• Effective knowledge
management practices
in CoP’s
• Influences
organizational culture in
institutions of higher
education

13. Selected Findings
• Contributions of the
Communities of
Practice
- individual learning and
professional
development
- increased
collaboration and
network development
with Web 2.0 tools

14. Selected Findings
• “When I talk with my community fellows
I tell them…we will not necessarily
complete the tasks before us, maybe the
project or the initiative will end…but we
will continue. We have developed links
that will not end with the project…we
must continue”.

15. Selected Findings
• Contributions of the Communities of Practice
- at the organizational level new practices and
services were developed.
- changes in library operations, increased
infusion of collaborative tools and Web 2.0
technologies for information services
- collaboration in electronic collection
development
- systemic virtual reference and portal
redesign project

16. Why were the communities successful?
• Institutional support
• Volunteer participation
• Non hierarchical ,
horizontal
• Information flow within
the community
• Facilitators were not
“committee leaders”

17. Good Practices in knowledge
management
• Information Technologies (Blogs, Wikis,
Facebook , e-mail, Real Simple Syndication
and Slide Share)
• Intercommunity exchanges documented in
minutes and agreements, intercampus visits
• Audio and video recordings (some published
in Facebook , and You Tube)

18. • “we knew early on that face to face
meetings would be difficult so we
decided to use a tool that would allow us
to meet online like Skype. We also used
blogs and Facebook.”

19. • “if there is one thing we should have
documented more is the way we decided to
integrate technologies. What happened from
the moment we began to explore a technology
to the time we decided to integrate it in our
work.”

20. Influence in Organizational Culture
• Relationship to the
university
• More effective
working arrangement
• Recognition of Library
Director’s Board
• Increased visibility of
librarians as innovative
academics.

21. Conclusions
• Understanding and
promotion of academic
libraries as places of learning
and knowledge creation.
• CoP as an organizational
development strategy can be
valuable to promote creativity
and innovation within an
institution of higher
education.
•Although collegial decision
making processes, knowledge
sharing and peer
collaboration are inherent to
the concept of university,
developed bureaucracies
hinder their capability to
comply with their mission.

22. jose.sanchez18@upr.edu
juvelez@upr.edu
www.slideshare.net/jasanchez