Developing and Marketing Knowledge Products in a Digital World

Every library, archive, and information centre sits on a vast reserve of raw information. But raw information by itself rarely helps anyone. A student doesn’t want a database of ten thousand articles; they want the three that answer their question. A small business owner doesn’t want a stack of market reports; they want a clear summary of what their competitors are doing. This gap between what exists and what people actually need is exactly where the knowledge profession earns its place. Knowledge products are the bridge across that gap. They are deliberately created, packaged, and delivered information goods designed to solve a specific problem for a specific audience. In a digital world, the ability to build and market these products has become one of the defining skills of information professionals.

What are knowledge products? 🔗

A knowledge product is any output that takes information and reshapes it into a usable, valuable form. The classic LIS framework describes a progression from data to information to knowledge. Data is raw and unprocessed. Information is data given context. Knowledge is information that has been analysed, synthesised, and made ready for action. A knowledge product is what sits at the top of this chain: a finished good built for a user who wants answers, not search results.

Knowledge products are not limited to printed books or journals. They include bibliographies, abstracts, indexes, literature reviews, trend reports, current awareness bulletins, subject guides, online databases, e-books, digital archives, and curated reading lists. The common thread is that someone has applied professional judgement to select, organise, and present information so that the end user gets more value with less effort.

This idea connects closely to knowledge management, which in many ways is library and information science applied at organisational scale. Knowledge embedded in an organisation’s processes and in its employees’ skills gives that organisation unique capabilities, and the discipline of drawing out and organising that knowledge has long been seen as the natural territory of librarians and information specialists. A study on knowledge management in libraries notes that managing information has historically been the domain of libraries, making them well placed to create and supply knowledge products.

Creating knowledge products: from content to package 🔗

Building a good knowledge product is a structured process, not a one-step task. The core of this process in LIS is often called information repackaging or information consolidation: a systematic way of adding value to information so it fits the needs and convenience of a particular user. The work moves through several clear stages.

Step 1: Identify the user and their need 🔗

Everything begins with understanding who the product is for. The most useful repackaging starts by diagnosing the information needs of a specific group of clients and then customising the content to match those needs. A product designed for school students looks completely different from one designed for research scientists, even if the underlying topic is the same. Skipping this step is the most common reason knowledge products fail. As one analysis of information repackaging explains, consolidation is part of library marketing because it is about identifying user needs and closing the gaps between what users want and what they can currently access.

Step 2: Select and evaluate the content 🔗

Once the audience is clear, the next task is choosing the right raw material. This means searching multiple sources, then critically evaluating what is found for accuracy, completeness, currency, and consistency. Not everything is worth including. The professional skill here lies in filtering: deciding what stays in and what gets cut. Combining information from different sources requires careful critical thinking, because a poor source can quietly undermine the credibility of the whole product.

Step 3: Restructure and add value 🔗

This is where information becomes a product. Restructuring can involve condensing long documents, rewriting technical material in plain language, translating content into another language, or converting it into a different format such as an infographic, a video, or an interactive guide. These value-added components include analysis, synthesis, editing, and transforming the format of the original. The goal is to improve how easily a user can understand, absorb, and recall the information. Good repackaging shifts the focus from the document itself to its actual content, and from the collection to the user.

Step 4: Package the product 🔗

Packaging is the physical or digital form the information takes: its arrangement, presentation, and medium. In a print world this meant binding, layout, and typography. In a digital world it means the design of a web page, the structure of a database, the user interface of an app, or the readability of a PDF. The classification and arrangement system itself is a form of packaging, since it determines how easily someone can find what they need. A well-packaged product has a clear presentation and, ideally, has been tested with real users before release.

Step 5: Disseminate the product 🔗

The final step is getting the product into users’ hands through the right channels. Dissemination is the distribution and delivery of information products and services to users through chosen channels, which may include in-house delivery, email, mailing lists, social platforms, or library websites. Choosing the wrong channel can waste an excellent product, so this decision deserves as much attention as the content itself. Traditional repackaging services such as Current Awareness Services (CAS) and Selective Dissemination of Information (SDI) are well-known examples of how libraries deliver tailored content to the right people at the right time.

Selling knowledge as a product 🔗

Understanding how to build a knowledge product is only half the work. The other half is understanding the market for it. Information professionals are increasingly adopting marketing techniques to become more effective managers of their services. Marketing here is not just advertising; it is a planned approach to identifying users, developing services that benefit them, and ensuring those services are actually used.

Understanding what customers actually seek 🔗

The starting point of any sale is knowing what the customer values. Many users do not want more information; they are already drowning in it. What they want is relevant, trustworthy, time-saving content. Information repackaging directly serves this demand because it saves the user time, labour, and cost. A busy professional will happily choose a concise, well-organised brief over a free but overwhelming pile of raw documents. The value lies in the synthesis, not the volume.

This means a knowledge professional must study the market actively rather than passively waiting for users to arrive. As a study on marketing of information products and services points out, an organisation cannot simply expect users to take its products just because they exist; it must study the market, create demand, promote its offerings, and arrange for proper distribution.

The marketing mix for information products 🔗

The classic marketing framework applies surprisingly well to libraries and information centres. The expanded marketing mix for services includes seven elements: product, price, place, promotion, process, people, and physical evidence. Each translates into a concrete decision for a knowledge product.

Product is the knowledge good itself and the unique benefit it offers. Price may be a direct fee, a subscription, or simply the time and effort a user must spend. Place is where and how the product is made available, including home access, study space, and digital platforms. Promotion covers both building a favourable image and actively winning users. The remaining elements, drawn from the marketing of library and information services framework, recognise that services depend heavily on the people delivering them, the process of delivery, and the physical or digital evidence of quality that users can see.

Why services need special handling 🔗

Information services have features that make them harder to market than physical goods. They are intangible, meaning users cannot inspect them before use. They are inseparable, since they are often produced and consumed at the same time. They are perishable, because an unused service slot cannot be stored for later. And they are variable, because quality can differ from one delivery to the next. Recognising these features helps professionals design marketing that builds trust and demonstrates value upfront, which is exactly what good packaging and clear presentation achieve.

Standing out in a crowded digital market 🔗

Libraries and information centres no longer operate without competition. Commercial databases, search engines, and freely available online resources all compete for the same attention. To stay relevant, information services must differentiate themselves through their unique strengths: personalised support, expert curation, verified accuracy, and community engagement. A discussion of library marketing notes that effective packaging bases its services on empowering the individual user rather than on the technical conventions of traditional librarianship. The product that wins is the one built around the user, not around the institution’s internal habits.

Knowledge and skills for organising content online 🔗

Creating and marketing knowledge products in a digital world demands a specific blend of expertise. The information professional of today is part librarian, part content strategist, and part digital technologist. The most relevant skills cluster around managing and organising content in web-based environments.

Content management and digital organisation 🔗

At the core is the ability to organise content so it can be found and used. Information professionals increasingly need IT skills covering databases, digitisation, internet searching, and content management systems (CMS) such as WordPress or Drupal. According to the profile of an information professional, these technical skills sit alongside strong customer service and the ability to address users’ real information needs. The European DigComp framework frames this more broadly, describing digital competence as including information and data management, communication and collaboration, digital content creation, safety, and technical problem-solving. As outlined in research on digital competences, these areas together define what it means to work effectively in a digital environment.

Web content skills 🔗

Organising content on the web requires its own toolkit. A web content manager is expected to be skilled in search engine optimisation, content optimisation, and analytics, while staying aware of accessibility standards and able to adapt content for mobile and multi-platform use. The web content manager profile highlights skills such as running content audits, setting content schedules, and tracking visitor behaviour through analytics. These are no longer optional extras for the knowledge profession; they are central to making a product discoverable and usable online.

Analysis, synthesis, and communication 🔗

Technical skills alone are not enough. The defining ability of a knowledge professional remains the capacity to analyse and synthesise: to read across many sources, judge their quality, and combine them into something coherent and trustworthy. Strong writing and communication skills then turn that synthesis into a product people can understand. The constant element across every definition of the role is judgement, applied with the user firmly in mind.

Accessibility and ethical handling 🔗

A final skill area, easy to overlook, is making products inclusive and responsible. As more resources move online, ensuring that digital platforms work for everyone, including users with disabilities, becomes a serious professional duty. Adhering to accessibility standards and offering alternative formats keeps knowledge products genuinely open. Combined with attention to accuracy and privacy, this reflects the ethical core of a profession built on serving users well.

Bringing it together 🔗

Developing and marketing knowledge products is a complete cycle. It begins with understanding a user, moves through careful selection, restructuring, and packaging of content, and ends with delivery through the right channels and thoughtful marketing. In a digital world, this cycle runs on a foundation of content management skills, web expertise, and the timeless professional ability to turn scattered information into clear, usable knowledge. The institutions and professionals who master this cycle will remain indispensable, because the volume of information will only keep growing, and so will the need for someone who can make sense of it.

What do you think? If you had to design a knowledge product for students in your own field, what raw information would you select, and how would you package it to save your audience the most time? And which single skill, technical or human, do you believe matters most for the future of the knowledge profession?

References

1. https://academicjournals.org/article/article1379411666_Kumar.pdf
2. https://www.iosrjournals.org/iosr-jhss/papers/Vol.29-Issue6/Ser-11/I2906114955.pdf
3. https://www.questjournals.org/jrhss/papers/vol10-issue5/Ser-4/J10057478.pdf
4. https://ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in/lisp6/chapter/marketing-of-library-and-information-services/
5. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/library-marketing
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_professional
7. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10987688/
8. https://www.prospects.ac.uk/job-profiles/web-content-manager/