Retention

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Definition

Retention is The process of keeping knowledge in an organization Source: Comparative Analysis of Methods and Tools for Nuclear Knowledge Preservation

Description

Knowledge retention is a term used for describing the efforts to keep explicit and tacit knowledge in the organization, often on long term.

tacit knowledge: loss critical knowledge --> capture and externalize, if not possible: retain people (reward systems etc.), role of retirees explicit knowledge: next text is more or less ok

The next stage of KP is storing the knowledge identified, captured and processed in robust and reliable devices to make it available for a long period of time. Storage practices by Member States, as revealed in a survey, mainly consist of archiving hardcopies and saving digital information in electronic formats.

Electronic or digital formats can be stored on hard discs, optical media (CD, DVD, etc.), streamers (magnetic tapes) and/or in a film library. These could be read-only or editable, full text or just abstracts. For information stored in databases, database design should consider ease of retrieval in the future using metadata, thesauri, taxonomies, ontology, etc. Integrated information systems provide interoperability of different knowledge formats, including text, data, drawings, videos, and/or 3-D models. The information can be classified by author, release number, date of production, subject and/or keywords. Computer aided metadata creation tools can also be used to create metadata automatically for knowledge resources. A combination of the following software/system tools can be used in the implementation of electronic or digital archives:

• Commercial relational database management systems (RDBMS), such as ORACLE, MSSQL, SYBASE, etc.;
• Intranet technology;
• Custom in-house RDBMS systems;
• Open source RDBMS, such as MySQL.

Some organizations are planning to upgrade their current storage formats, which involves enhancement of tools and technologies.

The IAEA’s INIS, undertaking preservation of nuclear knowledge for several years now, offers a very good example of data storage methods and tools, as shown in Appendix II.

Source: Comparative Analysis of Methods and Tools for Nuclear Knowledge Preservation

References

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