"Good" Information on the Internet

[Prentiss Riddle]

Somehow this thread has veered into the subject of comparative analysis
of Interenet search engines, a worthy topic but rather far from Lou's
original question:

| Subject: "Good" Information on the Internet
| Author:  lou at argus-inc.com
| Originator: web4lib at library.berkeley.edu at GLASNET
| Date:    3/30/96 2:26 AM
| 
| There are more and more books available that deal with searching the 
| Internet.  I'd be interested in getting a sense from librarians and other 
| information professionals as to the value of a book that helps Internet 
| users *evaluate* what they find.  This seems to me the next logical step; 
| once a user finds information, that user decides which resources to select 
| and which to reject.  I'd bet that most users aren't using the best 
| criteria to make these decisions.

Lou, I'm pretty sure that I saw a book recently which claimed to do
what you're talking about.  I didn't note the exact title, but a quick
browse through amazon.com's catalog suggests it was probably the
following (at any rate it had "research" and "Internet" in the title):

   The Student's Guide to Doing Research on the Internet by David R.
   Campbell, et al (Addison-Wesley 1995, ISBN 0201489163, paper, $14.95)

My own opinion is that this is a special case of the problem of how to
teach critical skills.  I'm not sure how much sense it makes to treat
the evaluation of online materials differently from the evaluation of
paper materials.  Certainly the "packages" differ, and people who are
going to create or purchase online resources need expertise specific to
the online medium, just as people who are going to publish or purchase
books need to know a lot about typesetting, different grades of paper,
etc.  But as for evaluating the *content*, I'm not sure that the skills
required differ very much between the online and paper media.

Yes, the do-it-yourself nature of the net means that there are fewer
editors, publishers, etc. filtering out the "bad" stuff.  But I'm not
sure we want to teach people that you can believe everything you see in
print and only have to be skeptical about what you see online.

Despite these reservations, the kind of project your propose probably
would meet a need.  Certainly there's there's always room for more
Internet books. :-)

-- Prentiss Riddle ("aprendiz de todo, maestro de nada") riddle at rice.edu
-- RiceInfo Administrator, Rice University / http://is.rice.edu/~riddle
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