Web studies

Lately I've felt like there have been a lot of serendipitous interactions between the different classes I'm taking this semester. One professor will introduce Belkin's theory of Anomalous States of Knowledge (ASK) for a discussion and the next week in another class we'll read Belkin's article discussing his propositions. It's definitely helpful to see how things like a single theory can apply to many different areas of library science, though it's been a tad confusing sometimes too--I'll get fuzzy about which article I've read for which class. The even more extreme example of this kind of thing consists of several events that have built up over the last weeks. In one class we spent a day talking about the flaws of library websites: what about them confuses users, and what could be improved (and the process to put these changes in effect). In another class we are coding our own websites as we learn about HTML and CSS. And finally in a third class we just turned in a paper analyzing the content of online archival institutions. So by rights I should be an expert or something now, right? I definitely notice the structure of websites more, and perhaps am a bit more judgmental about them too. And my own is definitely included in that critique. As soon as I understand CSS a little better, I'm planning to redo the look of the blog. This tan background has got to go.