Soft Systems Methodology Results Transform Professional Roles in the Digital Teaching Library

The phrase Digital Teaching Library serves as the guiding metaphor for our ‘library of the future ’ which will extend the physical library into a digital ‘library without walls ’ that connects users to teaching, collections, research, and services, while building and maintaining valuable core relationships. For the library to move from its traditional custodial role to pro-active delivery and integration of digital information resources requires repurposing the library and redeploying its assets. This paper describes the outcomes of an organizational transformation initiative that has readied librarians to assume new roles organizing virtual information and knowledge space (Materska 2004). While this knowledge management work certainly builds upon traditional professional competencies – librarians as mediators between information systems and users, it also encompasses new relationships between people, information, and knowledge. The Cal Poly experience suggests that librarians, as actors in the social structure of knowledge, can further information creation, usage, and transformation- helping people to learn, to be informed, to solve problems, and ultimately to create and codify new knowledge. To meet the profession’s new knowledge management responsibilities requires unitin