One Right Answer: A Community College Library's Leap into Knowledge Management

When the President of LaGuardia Community College wanted to support student success by providing user-friendly, accurate answers to student questions, she turned to the Library to lead a college-wide, knowledge management initiative. Not only was the Library the multidisciplinary heart of LaGuardia, it possessed the needed expertise in organizing and maintaining information resources. This collaborative project began with implementing an online knowledge base--Ask LaGuardia, launched May 2014. The goal of Ask LaGuardia is to give our community of students--many of whom come from lower income or immigrant families--the one correct answer to common questions about the College. Running on a commercial platform, it incorporates the different ways these first-generation college students ask questions into its metadata. This poster will describe the life cycle of knowledge base content, examples of challenges faced, our efforts to assess the success of Ask LaGuardia and the indispensable role of the librarian. Tablets will be on hand for attendees to try out the knowledge base. Ask LaGuardia works to help students navigate the complexities of a large, urban college by meeting them where they are and taking them to where they need to be.