Analysis of Online Syllabi in Library and Information Science : Do Academic LIS Programs Match with Job Requirements ?

The Web contains new potential sources of quantitative data that could be used to explore different aspects of library and information science profession. In this article the extent to which online syllabi and job announcements could be valuable sources to determine how the contents of LIS academic courses match with the existing job requirements in the libraries is assessed. A content analysis was conducted for both online course syllabi presented by 30 LIS schools in 12 countries and the sample of 200 current LIS job advertisements. These online syllabi and job positions were analysed for the number of occurrences of subjects and were classified in to the 32 pre-defined categories. The results indicated that about 70% of subjects extracted from the course contents matched with the requirements and skills mentioned in the LIS occupations. However, there were remarkable gaps for about 30% of subject areas such as "management of libraries", "interpersonal communication", "academic libraries", "metadata creation and coding", "financial issues in libraries", and "digital libraries", suggesting that these subjects did not appear to have much representation or weight in the many LIS programs, but they were requested as the essential qualifications by the LIS employers. A slight but significant correlation (r=0.400*) was found between the number of occurrences of subjects in the LIS courses and job descriptions, indicating that subjects more represented in the LIS academic programs also had higher demands in the current job market and vice versa. Finally, although significant trends were found, there were also several methodological and subjective limitations, suggesting that more qualitative investigations are needed to validate the quantitative results.