Tne web browsing assignment for this course involves searching the web for interesting pages relevant to this course, and evaluating them.
The web is a convenient source of information: you can search it from anywhere you have access to a computer; huge pieces of it can be searched easily using search engines like Alta Vista; it often contains very current information (compare it to a scholarly journal article, which may take years to go from author's manuscript to print); it allows publication of large volumes of material that would never make it into print.
But finding things on the web isn't always easy. The information you want may not be there at all -- lots of material is available only in hardcopy formats, so don't assume that using the web can replace a visit to the library. And the information that you do find on the web is often hard to interpret.
As you browse the web you'll run across a wide range of web pages. They may differ in subject matter, perspective, type of author, and degree of accuracy. Just as with the newspaper, "don't believe everything you read." But it's worse than a newspaper, since the web gives (almost) equal voice to anyone who wants to publish on it. When you look at a web page, essentially the only information you have to judge the page on is the information on the page itself. At least with a newspaper story you know it met the editorial standards of that particular newspaper, and you know whether the story was published in the Wall Street Journal or the National Inquirer.
You need to read what you find critically, both at the level of reliability of the information, and of biases the author of the web site may bring to the intellectual issues.
The following story originally appeared in the Charlotte Observer, 7 Jan 1997, and appears here by permission of the author. It illustrates many of the problems people have searching the web for information:
There are ways to check an Internet site's worth before accepting facts David Boraks
The student at Davidson College, near Charlotte, N.C., innocently turned to the Internet for help researching a paper on the origins of the AIDS virus.
Most of what she had found, both in printed and Internet sources, listed the conventional and widely accepted theories that the disease began among primates in Africa or in an isolated human population. She cited them, offering arguments for and against the theories.
Then she found an obscure World Wide Web site, not affiliated with any research or governmental group, that outlined in elaborate, if sometimes confusing, detail how the virus was supposedly invented in secret U.S. military laboratories as part of a biological warfare research project. She accepted it at face value and made it the central argument of her paper.
Her professors made her rewrite the essay. Why? Because the Web site she used didn't pass the usual tests for determining whether information is reliable enough for citation in an academic paper.
"Any time you have a topic that is potentially controversial, you're likely to run across these kinds of sites," said Frank Molinek, head of serials and government documents at Davidson's E.H. Little Library. "You find students assuming that what's at these sites is the same sort of thing as if you were reading a scholarly journal."
It's not.
Although the Internet can speed and simplify research, teachers and librarians say it also has added an unexpected and difficult challenge -- helping students learn to sift the good from the bad.
Since last fall, Molinek has warned of the pitfalls of online research during Internet orientation sessions for Davidson students. He is adamant that there are many benefits to using the Internet, but the information found there must be put to the same tests as printed information.
Molinek and other college librarians offer these tips for judging the value of Internet sites:
- What is the site's purpose? Will its information be unbiased?
- Who sponsors the site? What are the organization's values or goals? Can you contact the sponsors should questions arise?
- Is the information well-documented? Does it provide citations to sources used in obtaining the information? Are individual articles signed or attributed?
- What are the author's credentials? Is the author cited frequently in other sources?
- Lastly, how does the value of the Web-based information you've found compare with other available sources, such as print?
"A lot of it's real common-sensical," Molinek said. He said librarians and scholars have made careful decisions about what information students will find on a library's shelves. But, "when they sit down at the computer, they become responsible for keeping in mind the things that we as information-gatherers keep in mind."
Juanita Benedicto (1997, May 9). Evaluating Information on the World Wide Web. <http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~juanitab/knight/WWWinfo.htm>. [17 Dec 1997]
a brief guide from the UO Library.
David Boraks (1997, 3 February). Doing research on the Internet. <URL:http://www.mindspring.com/~dboraks/netcite.html:>. [13 Dec 1997]
a variant of the story quoted above, with tips for avoiding errors.
Grassain, Esther (1997, 5 November). Thinking critically about World Wide Web resources. <URL:http://www.library.ucla.edu/libraries/college/instruct/critical.htm>. [15 Dec 1997]
an outline of issues one should be concerned about when surfing the web for scholarly information, with some suggestions on how to identify high quality web pages.
Page, Melvin E. (1996, 20 February). A Brief citation guide for Internet sources in history and the humanities. H-Africa Humanities On-Line. <URL:http://h-net2.msu.edu/~africa/citation.html>.
an in-depth discussion of the issues involved in creating a bibliography that includes on line resources. Note that standards for the precise syntax of references to web pages are still in flux.
Stepno, Bob, and Henshaw, Bob (1995, 14 November). Quality of information.... and disinformation online. <URL:http://blake.oit.unc.edu/~rbstepno/disinfo.html>.
a light-hearted look at information quality on the Web.
Tillman, Hope (1996, 14 April). Evaluating quality on the net. From a paper presented at Computers in Libraries, Hyatt Regency Crystal City, Arlington, Virginia, Monday, February 26, 1996. <URL:http://www.tiac.net/users/hope/findqual.html>.
a case study of the process one might go through in figuring out whether a web site is really worth visiting and citing as a source of scholarly information, using a web site devoted to Gilbert & Sullivan as an example.
See also: