This past spring, libraries at leading universities such as Harvard, Oxford and Stanford, as well as one public library, the New York Public Library, announced an intriguing partnership.

According to a quarterly newsletter this spring from the New York Public Library, "Google will digitize a subset of the Library's books, making full text available over the World Wide Web." Given that the New York Public Library is participating in this project, those who benefit from on-line access to digitized books include not only students and professors at private universities, but also the general public.

What motivated the partnership? The New York Public Library's newsletter pointed out that although the number of visitors to libraries has doubled in the past decade, libraries aim to cut costs by sharing their collections and by reducing purchases of print reference materials whose information is already accessible on-line. In this context, presenting books on-line makes sense.

As the newsletter put it, "In a new twist on the Library's century-old mandate to provide access to its collections, the pressing question of today is not how can users get to us, but how can we get to them."

Call centers, like libraries, have a mandate to assist their constituents with finding information. They typically fulfill this mandate by employing people whom their constituents can go to directly for help, or by providing constituents with automated means of locating information themselves.

One difference between call centers and libraries is that call centers usually answer specific questions from customers about a company's products and services.

But a far more crucial distinction between call centers and libraries is that in a library, the flow of information goes in only one direction, from the library to its constituents. A company's customers, by contrast, aren't necessarily only consumers of information about a company's products; some customers have expertise to contribute as well.

When you think about knowledge management in the context of serving customers, the notion of a knowledge base as a library is no longer sufficient. These days, a knowledge base now encompasses a peer-to-peer network from which various constituents, including customers, can learn how to get the most out the products and services your company offers.

This article is about software that enables call centers to create and maintain knowledge bases. Using this software, a call center can help customers and call center agents retrieve answers to questions about the company the center represents. Such software can reveal answers directly to customers who visit a company's Web site, or can help call center agents answer questions from customers.

As we explain further below, knowledge management entails more than giving customers access to information that companies possess about themselves. Increasingly, knowledge management is about deriving value from what customers know about, and expect from, your company.