An ontological method for evaluating the Spanish labour market in Library and Information Science

The assessment of how well the skills and professional competence of students of Library and Information Science meet current labour market demands is necessary for the design of appropriate curricula. Such work, however, requires a great deal of effort on the part of researchers. A methodology is here proposed that should facilitate the periodic studies that need to be made in this area. A corpus of Information and Library Science curricula and another reflecting the demands of the labour market were compiled. A thesaurus was developed from the former body of information in order to record the terminology used in this area. This was then used to index the demands made in offers of employment. The results highlight where our curricula fail to meet the needs of the current labour market. The proposed method allows the coherence between curricula and labour market demands to be easily and periodically examined. The results were compared with those of previous studies in order to validate the proposed method.