Identifying Digital Librarian Competencies According to the Analysis of Newly Emerging IT-based LIS Jobs in 2013

The main purpose of this research is to identify the necessary competencies for the “Digital Librarian” job category advertisements. The approach of this research is qualitative and its methodology is content analysis. In a purposeful sampling, 596 job advertisements from 10 countries on indeed.com were selected and analyzed. The findings show that four job categories, namely IT Librarian, Digital Librarian, Metadata Librarian, and Digital Archivist, have 38% (227), 36% (213), 17% (103), and 9% (53) of the job advertisements, respectively. Moreover, the findings indicate that communication skills are most in demand in the “Digital Librarian” job category advertisements. To the author's knowledge, the present research is the first to comprehensively identify and categorize newly emerging IT-based job titles in the field of Library and Information Science (LIS).