Introduction

In Cultivating Communities of Practice, Etienne Wenger and his co-authors explicitly define only two member roles in a community of practice (Wenger, McDermott and Snyder, 2002). One is the co-ordinator, which is the community leadership role. The other is what they call the ‘community librarian’. By this the authors refer to activities such as current awareness, making notes on meetings and subject organization of material, and boundary work – connecting members to other experts in their field (2002, 102–3).

Given the level of excitement in the business world about communities of practice, and the increasing take-up of knowledge management ideas generally in government and the non-profit sector, that an information role is seen as central by influential authors is encouraging for the profession. Perhaps this is one path for librarians to take ‘out of the library into the organization’, as Davenport and Prusak put it (though not necessarily, as they advocate, having first ‘blown up the library’!) (Davenport and Prusak, 1993).

This paper explores the value of the ‘community of practice’ concept as a model of virtual work communities. It starts by defining the term and pointing to several problems with it as an ideal. It proposes, rather, that looser knit communities of interest or networks of practice are more common. Therefore, it is argued, community of practice might be better used as an ‘ideal type’ against which to explore social and informational dynamics, rather than as an ideal. A case study of one specialist IT community is explored to illustrate the approach. The paper concludes by arguing that if a community librarian role can contribute to user knowledge creation, it must be performed in a way that is sensitive to the specific culture that has developed in the community, with an awareness of social dynamics as well as informational issues.

What are communities of practice?

Definition

There is increasing interest in the communities of practice concept in many domains. Thus in the same month as Libraries Without Walls 5 (LWW5) was held, the annual UK learning technologists conference, Alt-C, was entitled ‘Communities of Practice’. The topic was also a significant strand in the Communities and Technology conference, which was taking place at the same time as LWW5 in Amsterdam. The commercial event organizers, Ark Group, had also organized a ‘Communities of Practice Masterclass’ in Brussels in the same month.