The Internet:  Fact or Fiction 

Web Site Evaluation Strategies

 

How do you locate sites that are accurate, relevant, current, and unbiased?  How can you help others evaluate web sites and the information they provide?  Join Library of Congress staff to examine web sites and create evaluation criteria that make the World Wide Web the research tool it can be.

 

Sites for Discussion

First Exercise:  Does this site meet the criteria we’ve established?

DiHydrogen Monoxide - Dihydrogen Monoxide - http://www.dhmo.org/

 

Second Exercise:  Beyond the Obvious

File extensions and domain names:  Determining bias, purpose, authenticity

 

  1. Legislative Information System of the US Congress - http://www.congress.gov/
  2. The Congressional Network - www.congress.net
  3. GOV. - www.congress.com
  4. Congress.org by Capitol Advantage - www.congress.org
  5. The Center on Congress at Indiana University - http://www.centeroncongress.org/

 

Sites for Exploration

The Dinosauria - http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/diapsids/dinosaur.html

Dinosauria On-line - http://www.dinosauria.com/

Jason’s Dinosaur Site - http://members.aol.com/Ermine/index.html

 

The ecoEnquirer - http://www.ecoenquirer.com

Global Warming - http://www.globalwarming.org/

 

The Civil War Home Page - http://www.civil-war.net/

Crisis at Fort Sumter - http://www.tulane.edu/~sumter/

United States Civil War - http://www.us-civilwar.com/

The Civil War Preservation Trust - http://www.civilwar.org/

American Civil War from Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War

 

Evaluation Criteria

 

I.  First Impressions

q       Page loading  (quick?)

q       Advertisements  (not distracting?)

q       Author &/or Organization  (labeled?)

q       Images & captions  (useful?)

q       Grammar & spelling  (correct?)

q       Links  (working?)

q       Navigation  (easy?)

q       Date of last page update  (recent?)

 

II.  Looking Deeper

 

Content

q       Information quality (current? accurate? complete?)

q       Vocabulary (appropriate for audience?)

q       Images (unedited?)

q       Sound recordings, movies (complete?)

q       Bibliography & webliography authoritative?)

q       Help (FAQ, help pages?)

q       Links from other pages (plentiful, reliable?)

q       Cost (free?)

q       Authorship

q       Author/ organization (authority on topic?)

q       Sponsor’s domain (well-known, reputable?).

 

Bias

q       Tone of site (objective?)

q       Point-of-view (objective?)

 

Web Site Verification Tools

 

Who links to a Web site?

 

To check the number of pages that link to the selected site:

  1. Go to a search engine such as Google, Yahoo, or Altavista. 
  2. In the search box, type link:http://webpageURL.  The search results page will display pages that link to the selected site.  Ex.  link:http://www.loc.gov.  In AltaVista (www.altavista.com), a link search on http://www.loc.gov/ yields 692,000 pages that link to www.loc.gov, the Library of Congress home page.

 

NOTE – Search engines respond differently to this exercise.  Try several search engines with the same URL to observe this at work.  Different results will also occur if the “http://” is deleted, links are written but not linked, or if the site is linked to a redirected URL.

 

Who sponsors a Web site's domain name?

 

To learn the sponsor of the domain name of the selected site:

  1. Go to http://www.internic.net/whois.html or http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/index.jsp
  2. Enter the domain name and extension.  [Find the domain name by looking at the first part of the web address.  Omit the “www” if present.  The domain name will be the remaining portion of the first part of the web address.  Ex. For http://www.loc.gov/ or a longer URL, http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/, the domain name is loc.gov.]

 

Web Site Evaluation Resources

 

Evaluating Information Found on the Internet, The Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University - http://www.library.jhu.edu/researchhelp/general/evaluating/index.html

 

Hoax?  Scholarly Research? Personal Opinion?  You Decide!, Media Awareness Network -

http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/resources/educational/lessons/secondary/internet/hoax_research_opinion.cfm

 

Piper, Paul S.  “Better Read That Again:  Web Hoaxes and Misinformation”,.  Searcher.  Vol. 8, No. 8, Sept. 2000 - http://www.infotoday.com/searcher/sep00/piper.htm

 

Schrock, Kathy.  “The ABCs of Web Site Evaluation." Classroom Connect, Dec. 1998/ Jan. 1999  - http://school.discovery.com/schrockguide/pdf/weval.pdf

 

(All sites accessed 9/2008.)

 

 

Portal Sites for Research

Virtual Reference Shelf, Library of Congress - http://www.loc.gov/rr/askalib/virtualref.html

Librarians’ Internet Index:  Websites You Can Trust - http://lii.org/

The Internet Public Library - http://www.ipl.org/