The Basileiad Library at Manor College. Information Literacy course. Evaluation of resources.

Evaluation of information resources is something you should do throughout your research. Evaluate each piece of information and either discard it or use it. Even if you discard it, keep a record in case you change your mind.

The important point about evaluation is that it is up to you. Your opinion is what counts, and your discernment is being developed as you evaluate.

Books.
If a book is published then someone must have thought that it provided useful information. Publishers are interested in making money, and a good reputation is important. So if something is in print, then it must have some validity, but be aware that some publishers are more well thought of than others. If a book is published by the author, that generally means that they could not find a publisher willing to take it on, so care should be taken with self-published resources. If a book is in a library, then either a librarian or a teacher thought that it was worth buying, so an evaluative step has already been taken.

Books can still be misleading or biased. Sometimes a particular publisher leans politically to the left or right. You must make up your own mind about this, while trying to be unbiased yourself. Book reviews can be useful here - try searching for the title of the book (in quotes) together with the word 'review', or looking through book reviews in key journals published by associations in the field.

Periodicals.
Many periodicals have a political bias. Newspapers  especially follow the political bias of their owners. Scholarly periodicals are more authoritative than popular periodicals. Details about the publisher of a journal should be located inside the first few pages. If a publisher has been set up to only publish one journal, there could be some bias. The key to  a periodical's authority is how well it is thought of by experts in the field for which it is published.

Be aware that although many of EBSCOhost's databases refer to 'scholarly journals' in their databases, they also include popular journals and do not distinguish between these. Do not assume that all the journals in any EBSCO database are scholarly.

If the author is well known in his/her field, they will be cited by other authors. Bibliographies can direct you to authoritative writers.

Web pages.
There are a lot of fraudulent web sites. Recently the federal government closed down a .gov site which was not a government site at all. Another website, which pretended to be a CNN site, was publishing fake stories before it was closed down. Sometimes it is thought that using only .org or .gov sites can be a way of ensuring that only current or correct information is found. But if we try “Czechoslovakia country site:.gov” we will get a description of Czechoslovakia, a country that ceased to exist in 1993, from the Library of Congress. This is because the search engine gave us what we wanted, and our search did not specify current information. To correct this, check the 'advanced search' section of your search engine. Some examples of fraudulent web sites are: www.dhmo.org,  www.rythospital.com  and www.gatt.org.

Search engines only deliver sites based on requested keywords, not on credibility. It is important to find out who established the web page, and when it was last updated. Try using www.ratite.com/whois or www.faganfinder.com/urlinfo for ownership information. To check the currency of the page, you could try the javascript command 'javascript:alert(document.lastModified)' in the url address bar to find out when the page was last updated. However, since this can be falsely generated by the site, try also to assess the content of the site. For example are "upcoming events" in the past? Or are current stories or "new products" out of date? Beware of the many personal web sites available to any amateur (for example, geocities' urls) without credentials.

There are some links to web sites that assist evaluation on the library's web site, under Evaluating Web Sites which can be found on the 'Student Resources' page.

The next page will tell you something about copyright that you need to know.

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