Letter: Reflections on possible reasons for excessive undervaluing of some professions and proposals for its reversal

Abstract

Some professions have lower social weight than others, with strength and power below their demographic representation or the use of their services by the population. These can be referred to as minority professions. Archivists, librarians, documentalists, and (perhaps) museologists represent one such example. Some causes of minoritization are general to the profession (e.g., civil servants, auxiliary positions, or work mostly carried out by women). This article does not deal with these, but rather the circumstances in Spain that exacerbate this effect. Two indicators of minority professions are: (1) the absence of the profession from forums where problems and solutions in the world of information are debated, and (2) a low degree of attractiveness of such studies to young people. This article attempts to define the value that a profession contributes to society and analyzes the three elements of such minorization that have been considered particularly Spanish: the secondaryization of studies, the depolitization of professional associations, and the fragmentation of the collective. For each of these, approaches to facilitate the reversal of this professional decline are presented. The work ends with a final reflection on the negative impacts of not reversing this effect.