Affiliations: [a] Departamento de Ciencias de la Documentación e Historia de la Ciencia, Zaragoza, Spain | [b] Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain
Correspondence:
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Departamento de Ciencias de la Documentación e Historia de la Ciencia, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Zaragoza, C/Pedro Cerbuna 12, 50.009 Zaragoza, Spain. Tel.: +34 976 762239; Fax: +34 976 761506; E-mail: jgarcia@posta.unizar.es
Note: [1] This paper was originally presented to the German-Dutch University Conference on the Information specialists for the 21st century (Hannover, October 14–15, 1999). We are very grateful to the organisation for having given us the opportunity to present and discuss our opinions.
Abstract: This paper analyses the changing environment of LIS education from a Spanish perspective and summarises some challenges that LIS educators and educational programme developers responsible for the information professional of the 21st century have to address in the near future. First, the state of the Spanish educational arena and the main trends in the LIS field are examined. Thereafter, some foci that must be urgently addressed in the educational programmes are isolated: Only by addressing changes in our curricula, by organising our disciplines in a strong theoretical corpus without sacrificing the achievements of the past and by putting the students at the centre of the educational process, will we be able to survive as educational and scientific agents in the new social information environment. These new foci are not seen as substituting previous educational emphasis in technical processes and technology, but as complementing them.
