Evolving information and knowledge has impacted all organisations, including academic libraries. This has made knowledge management become important. The conventional function of academic libraries is to collect, process, disseminate, store and utilise information to provide service to the university community. However, the environment in which academic libraries operate today is changing. Academic libraries are part of the university and its organisational culture. Whatever affects universities has an impact on academic libraries. As a result, the role of academic libraries is changing to provide the competitive advantage for the parent universities. The success of academic libraries depends on their ability to utilise information and knowledge of its staff to better serve the needs of the academic community. This requires academic librarians to reappraise their functions, expand their roles and responsibilities to effectively contribute and meet the needs of a large and diverse university community. Knowledge management is a viable means in which academic libraries could improve their services in the present knowledge era. This is a report of the results of a case study conducted to establish the ways in which the academic librarians of the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg Libraries could add value to their services by engaging with knowledge management. 1.

this paper may provide a model for assessing the knowledge processes with the construction industry. A further analysis of inter-organisational knowledge management, is provided by Levy et al's paper on knowledge sharing between SMEs (Levy, Loebbecke et al. 2001). This short paper highlights the notion of "co-opetition", simultaneous cooperation and competition. Of particular interest is the concept of using game-theory as a framework for analysing inter-organisational knowledge sharing where knowledge gained by co-operation may be exploited for competition (Levy, Loebbecke et al. 2001)