Seminar in Natural Science (online)
Finding Sources: Choices and Challenges (Part II)
Opportunities and Challenges
Most of you are pretty familiar with the joys and pitfalls of retrieving information via the web, or you wouldn't have signed up for this online course. As a scholar and teacher, I consider the web to be an absolutely invaluable resource, but I think of it as a complementary tool to the academic library. While the amount and diversity of information on the web has increased exponentially the last few years (and should continue to do so), searching the web is still a time-consuming and rather inefficient chore: even when using quality search engines, such as Google or AltaVista, you may have to sift through dozens of irrelevant "hits" to find the information you want.
Using the web for research involves at least three key skills: locating information, identifying/classifying the source, and evaluating the source. To cut through the chaos of the web and to give you a starting point for locating sources, I've developed over several semesters a 391 Links page for the natural science seminar. Spend a little time exploring the categories of links I've set up, as well as the individual sites within those categories. Some of these search tools (like the popular web search engines) allow you to surf the entire web for information. Others work somewhat like libraries, in that they categorize information according to subjects and refer you to lists of other websites. The 391 Links page is a convenient starting point for your internet research.
Another tool I've found useful of late is Google Scholar, a variation of Google that looks for scholarly sources -- journal articles, books, technical papers, etc. -- that usually don't show up on normal web searches. Some of the "hits" you get on Google Scholars searches will be full-text, others will only be citations that you'll have to use the RU library databases to get. But I frequently see references in GS to databases like JSTOR, which is available via our library's article search page.
Identifying Sources on the Web
The range and diversity of things on the web at this point is truly staggering. It's by now common knowledge that you can find everything from complete novels to candidates' political profiles to marketing pages for companies to government-sponsored reports to university department pages to tribute sites for guinea pigs authored by animal-loving 13-year-olds. It's all there, in a parallel universe of people, ideas, and information. So how do we sort through this information, identify what a given site is, and evaluate its quality? There's lots of good stuff on the web, but there's also plenty of garbage, and all sorts of things in between; some sources are reliable and thorough, some have shaky credibility, and some are downright crazy. So what to do? How to make sense of this cacophony?
An excellent website that gives us knowledge and specific strategy to begin organizing and evaluating what we find on the web is the website "Evaluating Web Resources," developed by library professionals Jan Alexander and Marsha Ann Tate. Alexander and Tate have come up with a fairly simple and useful classification scheme for web sources--it's not the final word on classifying websites, I grant you, but it's a good place to start. Their website explains each of the 5 kinds of web sources, provides links to examples of each type, and lists evaluative questions for each type of source according to specific criteria: authority, accuracy, objectivity, currency, and coverage.
Let's take a quick look at some of the features of this site. Once you're at Alexander and Tate's home page, scroll down to the table called "Original Web Resource Evaluation Module." Under the "Original Evaluation Checklists" heading, you'll find links to the 5 different categories of websites. Click on Advocacy Web Pages, for example. There you'll find specific guidelines on how to recognize and evaluate an advocacy page. You'll also find links to sample pages which illustrate this specific type of web source; you can view these pages and practice applying A and T's evaluation criteria to them. Do little surfing around their site and explore the other resources they provide on analyzing web pages. Notice, too, that although this site isn't fancy, it's highly informative and extremely well-documented--a couple of hallmarks of high quality web information.
Effectively identifying a web source is an important 1st step toward evaluating its quality. Part of that identification process involves classifying it: what kind of web page are you looking at? Another step in the process involves finding specific information about the page's identity, authorship, sponsor (if applicable), and date of publication. Think about it: if you found a piece of paper on the street, picked it up, and noticed that it contained a good quote relevant to a research project you were working on, could you use it? Suppose you could tell that piece of paper were ripped from a book, but you didn't know the author, title, or publisher--just a page # . . . what then? Most folks would agree that there's no way you could use that source, because you'd have absolutely no idea where it came from; yet that's precisely what often happens with internet-based sources in college research projects. We get seduced by the ease of information retrieval on the web, and we end up using things that aren't well documented or credible. Once you locate a source that looks relevant to the topic you're exploring, you need to make sure you can identify/document that source thoroughly, just as you would a traditional print source. If you can't find basic information about a web page, you're better off skipping it and moving on.
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02/25/06