[WEB4LIB] Article from Chronicle

[David (David King)]

> "Most creators of the library sites learned the 
> skills for Web-page design on their own, not in 
> formal classes" ... "The study ... is based on a 
> survey sent in January 1997 to the authors of 
> library Web pages"

This survey was sent in Jan '97, which means that those librarians' web
sites were created in 95-96. Question: how many formal classes WERE THERE in
95-96? Some, certainly - but not many. My library school had a small unit on
HTML within an Internet Skills class (other units focused on FTP, gopher
[egad!], searching, and probably other stuff - I didn't take it).

> All of the non-librarians and 94 per cent of the
> librarians who created Web pages said that their 
> Web skills were "largely self-taught" 

Back then, HTML wasn't hard to learn. One didn't have to worry about tables,
javascript, applets, Shockwave, PDF files, imbedded pages, web-accessible
relational databases, etc. Many pages were simply Gopher pages transferred
over to the web. Rather than wasting time in a semester-long formal class,
one could view the HTML source code for an hour or so, experiment for
another, and voila! he/she suddenly had HTML skills.

> "A key reason may be that few colleges and
> universities provided either time or financial 
> support for formal training"

I'd say the key reason wasn't time or support. There just weren't many
places to formally learn HTML, AND it was easy enough that those people
simply didn't need the training.

____________________________________________
David King, Information Technology Librarian
Kansas City Public Library
david at kclibrary.org