A historical introduction to Library and Information Science education in Journalism studies

Abstract

A historical journey of almost a century is made through the studies of Journalism in Spain, since the creation of the first journalism school, that of the newspaper El Debate, in 1926, to the current Bachelor's Degrees in Journalism which are taught in Spanish public universities for the academic year 2020-2021, in order to analyze the level of presence and importance of Library and Information Science (LIS) on these studies, given the lack of a similar work that brings together this entire historical spectrum of almost a century. Regarding the university stage, which began in 1971 and in whose analysis lies the main contribution of this work, there have been moments, mainly in the last decade of the twentieth century and in the first years of the twenty-first, followed by a progressive and still in force period of decline, especially since the end of the first decade of the current century, after the adaptation of university studies to the European Higher Education Area, which has generally brought with it a reduction in the number of subjects linked to LIS offered in Journalism studies and of hours of training in said discipline, especially of a basic and mandatory nature. Nowadays, considerable differences are observed at the national level among the offers of LIS subjects within the Bachelor's Degree in Journalism, these courses oscillating between three and one, with disparity in terms of their number of training hours, their nature and the year in which they are programmed.