"Good" Information on the Internet

[Susan Brown]

 ----------
>From: web4lib
>To: Multiple recipients of list
>Subject: Re: "Good" Information on the Internet
>Date: Tuesday, April 02, 1996 7:26AM

Prentiss Riddle wrote:

>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)

We actually previewed this book when we were looking for texts for a 
research methods class.  Unfortunately it does not talk about evaulation of 
sites/resources (I welcome a correction if I am missing something).  The 
book is set up more like a Krol guide -- what is the internet; how do I get 
connected; how to use Gopher, WAIS, WWW; where do I find info on my topic.

>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.

I agree. We taught how to evaluate resources.  Then we did a brief side trip 
to talk about applying these tecniques to the internet because the students 
have seperated the two (traditional and internet) in their heads.

I found two articles to be of help in thinking about the issue (and having 
our students think about the issue):

"Evaluating Quality on the Internet" by Hope N. Tillman, based on a 
presentation at Computers in Libraries, 1996.
 http://challenge.tiac.net/users/hope/findqual.html

and

"How to critically analyze information resources" put together by Cornell 
University Library.
http://urisref.library.cornell.edu/skill26.htm
This one presents the traditional evaluation criteria.

Hope these help.
Susan Brown
Interdisciplinary Librarian
Tutt Library, Colorado College
sbrown at admin1.cc.colorado.edu