By Susan R. Gibberman
You’re surfing the Internet for
an answer to your question. (I’m assuming it’s too late at night to call you
friendly, local librarian.) You type
your search string in Google—or the search engine of your choice—and you get
12,837 hits, give or take. How do you
tell which site is the best one to use?
In his book Digital Literacy,
author Paul Gilster writes, “We’ve inherited this notion that if it pops up on
a screen and looks good, we tend to think of it as fairly credible.” In traditional print sources, publishers should
verify the accuracy of the work before it is printed. Because there is no editorial board for the
Internet, the job of evaluating the information falls on you.
So how do you begin to evaluate
a web site? Unfortunately, there is no
single perfect indicator of a site’s reliability or value, but here are some
points.
When you look at a website, ask youself:
1. What is
the purpose of the site? Is it to
inform, persuade, or sell?
2. Who
authors the site? Does s/he have the
appropriate credentials (education, background, or experience) to expound on
the topic?
3. Does the
content seem biased, or does it present a balanced viewpoint?
4. Are
there other sites that provide better coverage on the topic? Shop
around.
5. How current is the
information? When was the site last
updated?
6. Has the site been
recognized by others, either in reviews or by other sites linking to it?
When the Internet came into popular use, many people often used
the address suffix (e.g., .gov, .edu, or .org) to judge the site’s value or
general purpose.
Using some of the guidelines noted above, let’s look at one of
my personal favorites—a consumer awareness site:
In its opening paragraph, the site itself provides its mission
statement—to provide information on the controversy surrounding an
environmental hazard—and its goal “to provide an unbiased data clearinghouse
and a forum for public discussion,” demonstrating their willingness to show
both sides of the issue.
The corporate authorship is the research division of a
The site is updated on a continual basis. Users can access recent reports on the issue
and can even sign up to receive timely safety bulletins. The site includes additional links to other
established groups such as the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), the CDC
(Center for Disease Control), the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, and the American
Cancer Society. A counter indicates the
site has been visited by nearly 2.2 million people, indicating it is a popular
resource.
So, based on some of the guidelines, this sounds like it would
be a valuable resource, right? If you
said “yes,” you don’t know me very well.
The site in question is www.dhmo.org, the homepage for the DHMO
research division of the U.S. Environmental Assessment Center. It provides information on the environmental
and personal dangers of DHMO, or dihydrogen monoxide. For those of you who didn’t pay close
attention in your high school science classes, DHMO is water. Now that you’re in on the joke, check out
this web site and see how they format it to look like a legitimate research
source.
Okay, so no system is perfect.
Hopefully, this will show you that you sometimes need to use a little
common sense as well.
By day, Susan Gibberman is the mild-mannered Head of Reader Services at the
Schaumburg Township District Library.
She has been a member of