Analyzing the Market of Newly Emerging IT-Based Jobs in Library and Information Science and Identifying IT Librarian Competencies

The main purpose of this paper is to study the IT-based job opportunities for Library and Information Science (LIS) graduates and identify the necessary competencies for an “IT librarian”. In a purposeful sampling, 596 advertisements of IT-based librarian jobs for LIS graduates in 10 countries on Indeed.com in 2013 were selected and analyzed. The findings showed that the four job categories, namely “IT Librarian”, “Digital Librarian/ Digital Services Librarian”, “Metadata Librarian”, and “Digital Archivist”, have 38% (227), 36% (213), 17% (103), and 9% (53) of the job advertisements respectively. Moreover, the findings revealed that 75 items of knowledge and skills are in the job advertisements of the "IT Librarian" job category. To the authors’ knowledge, the present research is the first to comprehensively identify newly emerging IT-based job titles in the field of Library and Information Science. It exhaustively reports the required competencies in the “IT Librarian” job category.