Online resources to help students evaluate online resources

Stephen Bostock, Educational Developments 2.2, 2001

The volume of information on the Web is both its strength and its weakness. With any one of the popular search engines a student can probably find many web pages or sites relevant to any topic. The real problem then starts: sifting through these 'hits' to find those documents most useful to the work in hand. There are very many documents online describing how to select the best or most relevant search method - portals, directories, search engines, metasearch engines - and how to perform efficient searches with them (e.g. Help with Searching at BUBL). There is less online advice for students about how to evaluate what they find! This is a list of sources of advice on evaluating, for academic purposes, information found on the web that it would be worth directing students towards or using to develop your own materials or teaching. Such advice should be provided alongside skills in the mechanics of finding online resources. Many of the documents are derived from good practice with paper-based resources. The importance of students critically evaluating what they find on the web hardly needs emphasizing. The most appropriate criteria to use will vary with context. Using one or two of the checklists below would be a good start, and re-cycling them to develop context-specific ones would be even better.

I have arranged the resources in three sections: documents providing advice, course materials on evaluating information, and lists of further resources one might want to browse.

Individual documents providing advice

The documents contain a variable mixture of discussion with lists of questions a student should ask them self, for example, 'what is the purpose of the document and why was it produced?' OASIS: Student Evaluation Methods for World Wide Web Resources, by T. T. Nguyen at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, has both. The result of a research project to develop an evaluation tool for high school pupils, it has considerable discussion but also provides a simple checklist of questions under five headings: Objectivity, Accuracy, Source, Information, Span (timeliness) - hence OASIS.

If the headings cannot form a word, then starting with the same letter is another tactic for making a checklist memorable. The Ten Cs Guide for Evaluating Internet Sources at McIntyre Library, University of Wisconsin, uses this: content, credibility, critical thinking, copyright, citation, continuity, censorship, connectivity, comparability, and context. While none of these are wrong or useless, they might not be the most natural containers for this diverse collection of issues.

Less catchy but to the point is  Teaching undergrads WEB evaluation by Jim Kapoun, a reference and instruction librarian at Southwest State University, USA. It organizes fifteen questions under five headings: accuracy, authority, objectivity, currency, and coverage.

Library Selection Criteria for WWW Resources by  Carolyn Caywood is a straightforward list of questions students should ask themselves about a web page, under three headings: access, design and content. Thinking Critically about WWW Resources is comparable and has also been around for a few years, but was updated last year. Also a list of questions, its headings are content, source and date, and structure. I have recommended both to my own students for some years.

Evaluating Quality on the Net  by Hope N. Tillman, Director of Libraries, Babson College, Massachusetts, is a wider discussion of reliable sources of online information, and it includes a short checklist of quality indicators and advice on evaluating sources.

Courses and teaching materials

Internet Detective  is an interactive tutorial on evaluating the quality of Internet resources. It takes my students about two hours to complete. Produced by the DESIRE project with funding from the European Union, it is available in three languages, it provides advice and teaching materials for teachers and is available for use off-line if you don't want to risk a class being dependent on a live network connection. Apart from giving sound advice, Internet Detective makes a good attempt at being fun, and the project provided me with presentation slides, paper literature and detective 'business cards' to give to students. I thoroughly recommend it either as part of a course or for self study.

Netskills has a large range of teaching and learning materials related to the Internet available for license, and example materials can be viewed at the site. If your institution has a license you can register online as an individual and download what you want (you can check if you have a license at the site if you try to register) . There is a self paced tutorial on Evaluating Information on the Internet that includes criteria to apply, and materials for a tutor-led workshop on the same subject are a PowerPoint presentation slides and a Word practical handout for students.

Evaluating Web Resources  by Jan Alexander and Marsha Ann Tate is a course and collection of resources for teachers to help their students evaluate web resources, including presentation slides. Not content with developing a checklist of quality questions, it has five checklists for different types of web sites: advocacy, business, news, informational, and personal web pages. In each case, though, they are grouped under the headings of authority, accuracy, objectivity, currency and coverage. There is useful material here for the teacher, and a book  Web Wisdom: How to Evaluate and Create Information Quality on the Web  by the web authors was published in 1999.

The Cyberlibrarians' Rest Stop 'contains helpful tools for the web searcher,  research on virtual library collections, web searching methodologies and a collection of resources for keeping current with Web-Based resources'. Well worth a visit, and most relevant here are the six online tutorials 'Web Searching, Sleuthing and Sifting'. Lesson 2a is 'evaluating what you find' which provides a checklist and suggested exercise. It also includes another, comprehensive, checklist Evaluating Web-based Resources: A Practical Perspective by Angela Elkordy with sections: general criteria, suitability for audience, content, timeliness, ease of use, presentation, appropriateness for web format, and special characteristics for the web.

The Internet Source Validation Project was an interesting attempt in 1996 at a practical tutorial for students in evaluating web resources. It organized 13 questions into two sections, concrete and context validity, and suggested a range of ratings that could be applied in each case, for example 'well written but biased'. It provides example pages on which students can try out the system. The system is probably too idiosyncratic to be used as it stands but it has some good ideas.

Lists of other sources

Finally, there are many lists pointing to other useful resources, to each other, and to the resources described above.
Evaluating Internet Resources (also known as the Medical Radiology Home Page) is maintained by Richard Terrass, at Massachusetts General Hospital. It is a short but select list.

The Evaluation of information sources at the WWW Virtual Library 'contains pointers to criteria for evaluating information resources, particularly those on the Internet. It is intended to be particularly useful to librarians and others who are selecting sites to include in an information resource guide, or informing users as to the qualities they should use in evaluating Internet information.' This is more comprehensive, with over 50 links, briefly described.

The Bibliography on Evaluating Internet Resources at Virginia Tech University Libraries is longer still. It includes print sources and books. Evaluating Internet Resources by Rick Lezenby at University of Pennsylvania is on a site about the history of nursing, but is generic, and includes summaries of some other authors' criteria.

Finally, Yahoo! is always worth a look, and it provides a short list of  Web Evaluation links. Their selection of just eight resources overlaps those described here.