Anyone can publish on the web. There is no quality control such as that provided by librarians who select items for their collections. This gives you the opportunity to do the quality control yourself, which can be empowering. But it makes it important for you to develop skills in evaluating information.
To evaluate online information, consider the following criteria:
How credible or believable is the source? Consider:
A source may have excellent credentials and yet be of limited value. In some cases, a source with less impressive credentials may turn out to be highly valuable.
Although financial motivations can cause information to be biased, keep in mind that many corporate sites are excellent sources of free, valuable information. Just remember to look at the information in context.
You may choose to overlook a minor discrepancy or factual error in an otherwise valuable source. But if you notice such a mistake, it makes sense to be somewhat skeptical. There may be other errors or omissions that you don't notice but that undermine the quality of the information.
Is the information current?
Currency may be extremely important for topics that are changing on a daily basis, such as information about Internet software and technologies. For other topics, such as a historical survey, currency may be less of an issue.
The web page should state the name of its author (or institution) and the date it was last modified or reviewed. Of course, the fact that a page was recently modified or reviewed doesn't guarantee that the information it contains is up to date. Check the dates of cited information and search for more recent versions.
Is the information relevant to your topic?
The content is not valuable to you unless it is significant. The information may be trivial. Or it may be common knowledge. Or it may be too general, and not include enough detail about the subject you are researching.
For example, a site intended for health care consumers may cover the same subject matter as a site for post-doctoral medical researchers, but the needs of the two audiences are different.
A web site that is easy to use is more fun and inviting. This encourages us to explore and to learn. A site that is very difficult to use may not be worth your trouble. Bad design does not equal bad information, but your "skepticism meter" should turn on.
Some sites are designed for interactive learning while others serve primarily as a means of distributing documents. In the second case, you could decide to print out pages of the site rather than reading online.
