Title:Is This Website Any Good?

Is This Web Site Any Good?

EVALUATING THE ACCURACY OF AN INTERNET WEB SITE IS ESSENTIAL IN USING ELECTRONIC INFORMATION WELL

Last month, we provided some guidelines for evaluating the accuracy of a book or journal article. This month, we continue our examination of information sources with a discussion of the evaluation of web sites. What was said about evaluating books also applies to web sites; however, there are enough differences and added problems that we discuss web sites separately this month.

Print resources provide much more control over content and accuracy than web resources do. First, publishers can only exist if they sell their publications. To insure accuracy, publishers employ editors and fact-checkers to verify information in their books. Second, since libraries have limited amounts of money, they ordinarily will only purchase books and journals which are reasonably useful for research (i.e., accurate and up-to-date).

But almost anyone can publish on the web. In most cases, there is no control on what gets posted or said. Many commercial companies and educational institutions offer their customers and/or students space to set up their own personal home pages. These pages become "virtual soapboxes." On these home pages, an individual can say anything he or she wishes-whether or not the statements have any basis in fact.

Many such home pages provide nothing of scholarly and academic interest. Thus, any page which may provide good research material must be evaluated carefully. Any information on the web page should be verifiable by outside resources.

The traditional criteria for evaluation of information sources are the following: authority, accuracy, objectivity, currency, and coverage. Determining these for a web page is sometimes very difficult, if not impossible. For most printed authors, you can find published biographies in reference works; the blurb on the jacket can give you some more information. But web pages rarely tell you the background of the author-if you can determine at all who is responsible for a particular web page. An official home page can be considered accurate (if perhaps not always complete). But sometimes, an "official looking" page has no authority but some individual behind it, and you must regard it accordingly.

Even apparent objectivity needs to be verified. Citations to other works are not necessarily accurate. A web site to which a recent e-mailed reference question referred included this sentence: "Souer's History of the Christian Church cites a reference to the famed leader of the protestant reformation of the 16th century, stating, 'Dr. Martin Luther was a prophet, evangelist, speaker in tongues, and interpreter, in one person, endowed with all the gifts of the Spirit.'" The author gives a list of sources, but without publication data. A search of OCLC (see story in the next column) produced no hits for this work at all. If it exists, none of the 32,000 libraries in OCLC has recorded owning it. A printed book or journal might, of course, also contain a reference to an apparently non-existent work. For printed sources, however, a reputable publisher will try to verify citations in his published works.

The Internet (and specifically, the World Wide Web, one part of the Internet) is one of the newest information sources. Used wisely, it can provide access to information which is quite difficult to find in more traditional information sources. But the Internet also includes an incredible amount of junk. As long as you don't discard your critical thinking when approaching and using information from the World Wide Web, you will find many valuable nuggets of useful and accurate information. v

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