Page 45 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 44

044 Journal of Library Science in China, Vol.10, 2018

2.1 From human intelligence to the “intelligence” of the library

When it comes to the word “intelligence”, its original meaning basically refers to “people”,
describing the ability of people to understand, discriminate, judge, invent and create things (The
Dictionary Compilation Committee, 2000). So the discussion of the smartness of the library should
also start with “people” and clarify the direction of the smart service of the library on the basis of
clarifying the process of human smart activities.
1) The intelligence activity of people with knowledge
From the perspective of knowledge theory, “intelligence” is the activity in which human beings
reason and reflect on things and exert subjective initiative. The process can be divided into two
levels: individual intelligence activities and collective intelligence activities (Gan & Zhu, 2006).
There are two stages in the individual’s intelligence activities. One is internalization (Nonaka,
1991), which means that from the existing objective knowledge or practical activities, it forms
its own internal meanings about facts, events and social environment. It is also the individual’s
knowledge construction and recognition of the objective world, which belongs to the individual’s
shallow intellectual activities, and does not produce new cognition. The second is socialization
(Nonaka, 1994), which means that common cognition and the individual’s existing cognition
work together and conduct brain activities such as discriminating, judging and reflecting. Then
the process generates new cognition, that is, the unique “hidden knowledge” of the individual.
This activity belongs to the deeply smart activities that exert human’s unique subjective initiative.
And the new cognition generated may be a kind of new recognition of the objective world and
contribute to the development of human society.
Since then, the individual’s intellectual activities would produce high-level intelligent behaviors
when they are collectively crossed, which is also the process of recognition and explicitness of
individual “tacit knowledge”. In Karl Raimund Popper’s three worldviews of knowledge, the
transformation from the second world to the third world requires interpersonal communication
and practical knowledge utilization (Popper, 1987). Therefore, in order to realize the explicitness
of individual tacit knowledge, it is necessary to use collective intelligence to verify it through the
collective communication and collective evaluation after knowledge application. On the one hand,
it needs to share and externalize individual unique knowledge, and gain recognition in the process
of communication which may get more profound and detailed understanding of the original
knowledge, realizing the explicit transformation of collective tacit knowledge and becoming
acceptable public knowledge (Cress & Kimmerle, 2017). On the other hand, individuals apply
their own tacit knowledge, and the results produced by the application need collective wisdom
to evaluate. This process will screen out valuable tacit knowledge and realize the sublimation of
explicit knowledge in collective recognition. In fact, the knowledge system that has objective
world cognition has also been formed in the collective recognition and inheritance of previous
generations. Therefore, smart activities require individual learning and cognition as well as