Critically Evaluating Web Content - nova.wpunj.edu

Critically Evaluating Web Content

For many the web is a part of everyday life. We create presences on the web. Our
organizations and institutions feel that it is important, even crucial, that we are findable
on the web. Large sums of money are spent by organizations to increase their findability.
Before about 1992 we considered libraries to be the repositories and gatekeepers of
information; the loci of research. Today, our undergraduates come to us already
accustomed to using the web for their information gathering activities and with the
assumption that everything they need will be there. They do not consider the library a
primary source for information. In Karen Schneider’s posting yesterday to the American
Library Association’s TechSource Blog she said: “We are not even close to being the first
service of choice for information seekers; we are pretty much down there with asking
one's mother.” 73% of college aged students report that they favor use of the Internet
over the library for their information-seeking needs. (Educause article).Times are
changing, and it is true that we are able to do an amazing amount of scholarly research
using the web to access databases and other appropriate materials. The challenge, of
course, is to sort the appropriate from the billions of pieces of internet “chaff”.

The quality of the web’s content varies exactly as does the quality of content in other
media. S. P. Ranganathan (1892-1972), Indian mathematician and librarian authored what
librarians consider the fundamental tenets of their philosophy:

1. Books are for use.
2. Every person his or her book.
3. Every book its reader.
4. Save the time of the reader.
5. The library is a growing organism.
Some of these may well apply to the web. Every person his or her web page. Every web
page its reader. The web contains a cross-section of our world, from the scholarly and
sublime to the prurient and useless. It appears to be a growing organism.

As educators we have as an objective the selection of appropriate resources for our
students. Knowing and teaching selection criteria that are built upon basic critical
thinking skills will ensure that our students become wise consumers of information.

The importance of teaching selection criteria has risen with the size of the web. A host is
a place with one or more servers that can ‘host’ web sites. In 1991 there were 617,000
internet hosts, where email networks, online bulletin boards, telnet repositories, and the
first real web sites were established. In 2006 there were 439,286,364 hosts, an increase of
71,097% in 16 years.

As of 8/8/2005 Yahoo indexed over 19.2 billion web documents, 1.6 billion images, and
over 50 million audio and video files. http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000172.html

The web has changed. It has pervaded our lives, or at least the lives of many millions of
us. We turn to it for news, for information of all sorts. In these 16 years it has gone from

a static array of isolated files to a seemingly intelligent agent (in certain places) who
learns our information seeking habits and offers us more of what it thinks we like.

The web has indeed grown, but the criteria by which we need to evaluate it have not. In
1995 Hope Tillman of Babson College, MA made a presentation at Harvard on
evaluating the quality of information on the web. Revised and updated over the years, it
exists as a part of the canon of web evaluation. Tillman advances the fundamental belief
that “We need to use the same critical evaluative skills in looking for information on the
Internet that we would do in a book, a paper index, a musical score, or on an online
commercial database,” (Tillman, 2003). Tillman’s general criteria are:

• Stated criteria for inclusion of information
• Authority of author or creator
• Comparability with related sources
• Stability of information
• Appropriateness of format
• Software/hardware/multimedia requirements

These checks remain fairly constant
throughout the other criteria/web evaluation
sites. Over the years I’ve used a simple
analogy with my students to get them to think
critically about what they see on the web. I tell
them to think about walking down the street
and seeing a hot dog lying beside the road. I
tell them that they are mortally hungry, and
that they pick up that hot dog. I ask them to tell
me what questions they might ask themselves
as they decide whether they should, indeed, eat
it.

• Where did it come from?
• How long has it been here?
• What’s it made of?
• Will it hurt me if I eat it?
• Will it satisfy my hunger?
These are not unlike the questions that must be asked of websites. These are at the
nucleus of critical evaluation of web content:
• Can you determine the author or origin?
• Can you confirm the authority of the source?
• How has the information been verified or confirmed?
• Is the information objective?
• Is the information current?
• Is the information relevant, useful, or in-depth?

So, despite the assumptions from some of our students that the web is a sure-fire stand in
for the library, it’s not that simple. No one is selecting and evaluating most of what is

found online. Short of the scholarly databases we access and the small-but-growing body
of free, online scholarly publication; it is a rag-tag flea market where the onus is
absolutely on the buyer to beware.

Resources:

ALA TechSource Blog
http://www.techsource.ala.org/blog/

Hobbes’ Internet Timeline© (used with author’s permission)
http://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/#Growth

Evaluating Web Pages: Techniquest to Apply & Questions to Ask
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/Evaluate.html

The Good, The Bad & The Ugly: or, Why It’s a Good Idea to Evaluate Web Sources
http://lib.nmsu.edu/instruction/evalcrit.html

Evaluating Web Sites: Criteria and Tools
http://www.library.cornell.edu/olinuris/ref/research/webeval.html

Thinking Critically About Web Page Content
http://www.lib.msu.edu/link/critical.htm

Evaluating Quality on the Net
http://www.hopetillman.com/findqual.html

Oblinger, Diana. “Boomers, Gen-Xers, & Millennials: Understanding the new students,”
Educause, July-August 2003, 37-45.
http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ERM0342.pdf