A study of labour market information needs through employers' seeking behaviour

Introduction. The objective of this study is understand the information needs that businesses have while seeking Library and Information Science professionals and analyse how they formulate those needs. Method. The analysis is performed by examining the professional skills and capabilities demanded in job offers published. A total of 1,020 job offers collected from a Spanish employment agency Website have been analysed for the period between 2006 and 2008. Analysis. Knowledge representation techniques using thesauri have been used for the automatic content analysis based on natural language processing. Data extracted from the corpora have been analysed statistically. Results of this study indicate a demand for skills related to technological advances and the management of electronic resources as well as to technical aspects associated with the Informatics domain. The knowledge of languages and the possession of an academic title represent essential factors in the job offers. Conclusions. This method permits the identification of changes in the information needs and the contexts inherent to the profession. The advantage of using thesauri permits other research groups to reproduce the results. The re-use of semantic categories, common to other fields, facilitates the reproduction of this method with other occupational groups or social roles.