The Role of Social capital in Knowledge Management Practice in University libraries of Mashhad

The aim of this study was to find the relation between social capital and the practice of knowledge management (KM) in university libraries of Mashhad. Two questionnaires were used in this survey for collecting data. The first questionnaire was adopted from Nahapiet and Goshal’s organizational social capital assessment instrument. Its aim was to assess the status of social capital in university libraries. The second one was designed by the researchers in order to investigate the opinions of librarians of university libraries with regard to the extent to which they implement KM activities in their libraries. The results showed that there is a significance relationship between social capital, cognitive social capital, structural social capital, relational social capital and the implementation of knowledge management. Among the dimensions of social capital, the relational dimension is most associated with the implementation of knowledge management.