Welcome to SAFARI Asks: “what is information?” and considers the types of information that we use in everyday life and for studies. Recommended duration: 1 hour Looks at where information comes from and goes to; how it gets categorised and spread around, and where you may find it. Recommended duration: 1 hour Looks at how to think about information in ways that will allow you to create a search strategy, and use it to access catalogue and database resources. Looks at the practice of searching - on and offline - and how to use different electronic search tools and techniques. Asks how information can be evaluated for quality and why this needs to be done, and suggests a tool to do this. Explores why information needs organising and ways of doing this using tools and techniques, including referencing, bibliographies, social bookmarks etc. Follow the About Safari link if you would like to know more about how Safari works.
Elusive Quality of Web Quality: World Wide Web Review by Susan Barribeau Website evaluation is an ever-present concern in my line of work, reference librarianship. As a daily consumer of information from websites I have become considerably less starry- eyed about the vast quantities of information available and much more selective about quality. Nobody has time to waste on a site offering incomplete, inaccurate, outdated, or disorganized information. Today's World Wide Web consists of documents and files that constantly move, mutate, vanish, and reappear looking very different, or appear simultaneously in more than one place. Objective evaluative criteria for websites can be organized into several general categories of importance; Carolyn Caywood (see reference below) suggests these: content, access, and design. Let's look, for example, with a critical eye at a website that is a directory of women's resources: WWWomen! There are two links for site information (one to "About WWWomen!"
Virtual Training Suite - Home Page Website evaluation - Study Skills - Upgrade Study Advice Service It can be hard to know what you're looking at on the web. Is it any good? Can you use it for your assignment or research? Evaluating web sources (Oxford Brookes Library guide). You can use any of these sets of criteria if you are asked to evaluate sources as a set piece of work. Information skills :: Library Get started quickly: click to access a range of tutorials in different aspects of library use and information skills. <a href="/library/infoskills/tutorials.html" title="Information skills" rel="section"><img src="/library/img/inline/cust/infoskills/earthmap.jpg" alt="Information skills" /></a><h1><a href="/library/infoskills/tutorials.html" title="Information skills" rel="section">Information skills</a></h1><p>Get started quickly: click to access a range of <a title="Tutorials" href="/library/infoskills/tutorials.html">tutorials</a> in different aspects of library use and information skills.</p> Using databases Find more information on the bibliographic databases that are directly related to your subject and discover their main features through online tutorials. Using the web for your studies Learn how to find relevant and reliable information for academic work, use Google and Google Scholar really effectively, and discover other useful web resources and searching tools. Referencing
Home - Evaluating resources - Library Guides at UC Berkeley To find out more about an author: Google the author's name or dig deeper in the library's biographical source databases. To find scholarly sources: When searching library article databases, look for a checkbox to narrow your results to Scholarly, Peer Reviewed or Peer Refereed publications. To evaluate a source's critical reception: Check in the library's book and film review databases to get a sense of how a source was received in the popular and scholarly press. To evaluate internet sources: The internet is a great place to find both scholarly and popular sources, but it's especially important to ask questions about authorship and publication when you're evaluating online resources. Evaluating Web Pages: Techniques to Apply & Questions to Ask 1. What can the URL tell you? Techniques for Web Evaluation : 1. Before you leave the list of search results -- before you click and get interested in anything written on the page -- glean all you can from the URLs of each page. 2. 2. 1. INSTRUCTIONS for Truncating back a URL: In the top Location Box, delete the end characters of the URL stopping just before each / (leave the slash). Continue this process, one slash (/) at a time, until you reach the first single / which is preceded by the domain name portion. 3. Check the date on all the pages on the site. 3. 1. What kinds of publications or sites are they? Are they real? 3. Expect a journal article, newspaper article, and some other publications that are recent to come from the original publisher IF the publication is available on the web. Look at the bottom of such articles for copyright information or permissions to reproduce. 4. 1. a. Type or paste the URL into alexa.com's search box. b. 1. 2. 5. 1. 2. WHY?