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Librarian Central |
Beyond Algorithms: A Librarian's Guide to Finding Web Sites You Can TrustOkay, so your favorite search engine has turned up thousands of web sites on the topic of your choosing. Which ones should you trust? As a librarian who runs a web site catering to people with a hunger for authoritative resources, I'm often asked that question. As a result, my colleagues and I have developed a five-point system for separating the wheat from the chaff. While we pride ourselves on our small but well-groomed collection of reliable, trustworthy, librarian-selected web sites, there's really no magic to what we do. It's simple methodology you can use at the reference desk or any other place you find yourself staring at a page of search results and wondering where to begin. Whether we're selecting new web sites for our newsletter or deciding whether to toss or keep sites already in our collection, we rely primarily on what we call the "big five show-stoppers": availability, credibility, authorship, external links and legality. 1. Availability Is the site up and running? Is the information freely available? The first question can be answered fairly easily — either the web site is there, or it's not — but the second question is more complicated. Many web sites put information behind walls of one sort or another. It may be worth it for you to pay a fee or register to gain access to a web site, but at the Librarians' Internet Index (LII), we pass along only freely available sites because our working assumption is that when you're hunting for information, either for yourself or for a library patron, free access is good. In addition, we are leery of sites that require registration to view most or all of the site, since it's often unclear how your personal information will be used. Of course, this isn't a hard-and-fast rule. We don't reject a site just because it has some information behind a wall. For instance, Open WorldCat is a terrific database for locating books in libraries worldwide, and if the book is available for purchase, you'll find at least one link to an online store. There's no harm in that (except to bookaholics like us, where it's dangerous to our pocketbooks). But if most or all of WorldCat site was fee-based, it wouldn't be very useful to anyone who isn't a subscriber. Shortcut: To determine if information "behind the wall" is worth your time and/or money, skim the web site's mission statement, "About" page, or registration sign-up page. For example, the Ellis Island Foundation makes it clear that by registering for free, you'll be able to take full advantage of the site's functionality. 2. Credibility Does the web site contribute current, accurate information? Is the site author(s) qualified to present the content provided? In reviewing the sites we've rejected for LII in the past six months, we found that the majority had credibility problems. Either the content was clearly substandard (including, for instance, recipes that misstated quantities, or definitions we knew to be wrong) or the author lacked the credentials to present the content on the site. We don't rule out personal web sites, but we scrutinize them carefully. Sometimes we select sites maintained by hobbyists when the content is fun or recreational, such as Patently Absurd, a web site featuring weird patents. Sometimes we select sites when we can use our own subject knowledge to assess the content, as we did when we chose the yummy web site, Tiramisu: Heaven In Your Mouth. But personal web sites aren't always what they seem, and we wouldn't want anyone following health advice from a quack, or using a knitting pattern that results in the proverbial sweater with three arms. We're always surprised when potentially good web sites don't provide information about the author's credentials right up front. If we aren't sure about a site, we write the author. If they don't respond, or we're not convinced of their credibility when they answer, we reject the site. Shortcut: Look for an "About" page or an author biography. Shortcut: There are some sources that you can nearly always trust. Many librarians busy helping patrons at the desk, over the phone, or in instant messaging sessions use Google searches limited to the .edu or .gov domains to quickly winnow the search to sites known to be authoritative. For example, a Google search for "breast cancer site:gov" will yield high-quality web sites. 3. Authorship At LII we're very skeptical of web sites with more than a couple of typographical or grammatical errors. In addition to how poorly it would reflect on us to point someone to a grammatically challenged web site, it's a big hint that the content on the site is generally not up to snuff. We do make some exceptions for web sites translated from languages other than English, if we can find someone to verify that the content in the original language has correct spelling and grammar. The English is a little rocky on the lovely web site, Paris at the Time of Philippe Auguste, but we have it on good word that the original French is très bon. Shortcut: If you think a web site has more than the average number of typos, copy a representative page and dump it into a Word document for a spell-check. 4. External Links Nothing kills a web site's reputation faster than broken links leading elsewhere. Broken links are a flag that the author is not paying attention to the content. Give web sites some latitude, though; there was a time when one broken link among many would cause us to reject a web site, but it's more common nowadays for people to move content to another URL, making it difficult for even the most fastidious webmasters to keep up. If you spot a broken link on a site you like and use, let the webmaster know; we appreciate these tips, and so do people at the sites we communicate with. But if you see many broken links rather than just a few, that's a cue to pass the site by. Shortcut: Look for evidence that the web site maintains its links, such as notes indicating when a page was last updated, and beware of student project web sites and personal web pages with many, many links! 5. Legality The author of a legitimate web site will ensure that she is legally entitled to publish the content on her site, working within copyright and fair use guidelines. It's common to hear the author of a web site claim she is engaging in "fair use." Sometimes this is a reasonable argument, such as when an author uses examples of an artist's work in order to discuss it. Sometimes it's just a smokescreen — an excuse to justify posting someone else's work. Shortcut: It's a lot easier to assess whether a web site complies with copyright law when you're familiar with its basic principles. Brad Templeton's guide to common copyright myths is a good primer. Shortcut: Trust your instincts. If a web site looks and feels like a rip-off, it probably is. Take a chunk of its text and paste it into Google to see if it shows up elsewhere. Shortcut: Avoid fan sites, lyric sites, paper mills, and any site posting newspaper or magazine articles (the full articles, not quotes or links) without also posting explicit permission statements. So there you have it — the big five show-stoppers. Of course, once a web site makes it past the first cut, there are more finely grained heuristics for gauging authority. But you'll have what you need to be sure it's worth your time to dig deeper: a site you can trust.
Karen G. Schneider, a librarian and writer, is the Director of Librarians'
Internet Index (LII). Her personal blog is Free
Range Librarian. She freelances for the library press, most recently at
the ALA TechSource blog. Other questions? Send us a note. Every newsletter we'll try to answer 1 or 2 of the most frequently asked questions. |