Information Online

Information Online

• Evaluating web resources
• Developing an effective search strategy
• Understanding how search engines work
• Using dynamic and interactive parts of the web   









For most of us, the web is about finding information, whether that's authoritative and reliable
facts, the best price for something we want to buy, or how much we owe the credit card company
this month. Understanding the tools we can use, and the nature of the web itself, is fundamental
to finding all of these and more.

Evaluating Internet Resources

• Why is there so much junk on the web?

• How can we tell what's good from what's bad?

• What criteria can we use to judge a web page?

• What is an authoritative page?

Computers are good at storing, searching and sorting data. The Internet could be considered the
largest database yet developed; the amount of data its servers collectively stores is phenomenal.
This gives rise to the fundamental paradox of the Internet: given all this data, how do we find
what we need? And how can we tell that it's true and accurate when we do find what we want?
Firstly, we need to understand why this is a problem.

Publishing for All


• Web makes it easy to publish information widely with HTML
• No filters or editors to prevent the “rubbish” from being published
• No “market forces” to weed out unpopular material


One of the most fundamental characteristics of the web is the fact that it allows almost anyone to
publish information and documents to a very wide audience. As we saw in the section called “The
Web's unique features”, it's both easy to create web pages, and to publish them onto a globallyaccessible
webserver. This is a fundamental shift in publishing method from anything that has
gone before, since it is a simple process that allows access to a potentially massive audience Traditional “filters” such as the publishing companies have effectively prevented the publication
of poor quality or innacurate material, extremist views or libellous articles. Anything that escapes
the traditional editorial processes would be subjected to the market forces involved in distributing
paper-based material, which can be costly. And publishing law is well-tested for those seeking
redress against libellous or hateful material.
But the shift in the publishing paradigm to electronic media leads to a number of issues for the
reader, which can be summed up in the question “How do I find useful, reliable information on
the web?”


Useful and Reliable

• Developing a set of criteria for judging academic material

• Accuracy

• Timeliness

• Authorship

• Page and site integrity

• These can be applied to general web material too

How do we judge whether information we have found is useful or reliable (or hopefully, both)?
The following subsections examine some of the questions we should be asking about the webbased
materials we are using for academic research and learning; they also apply in many cases to
more general-purpose web resources. The criteria are adapted from the SOSIG Selection criteria
[http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/desire/quality/appendix-4.html] [accessed 5 Nov 2006].


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Accuracy


• Does the information seem accurate according to what you already know?
• Is the information produced and presented with care?
• Is any referenced material cited and credited accurately?


Timeliness



• Is the information time-sensitive?
• If so, how up to date is the information?
• Does the information appear to be well-maintained?




Authorship

• Is the author or maintainer of the page clear?

• Is the author's identity verifiable?

• Is the author a recognised authority on the subject?

• Have they published other works in this area?

• If not, are they representing a responsible body which has some authority in the subject

area?

• Has the information been edited or peer-reviewed by some authority?

Searching Effectively

• Why is searching the web so difficult?

• No complete catalogue

• The web is too large to catalogue comprehensively

• The web grows and changes too quickly

Unlike a library, the web is a relatively unbounded resource, to which there is no complete
catalogue. With a library, it is usual to have a record of all books within it, and to be able to search
those records with some guarantee that your search is comprehensive within the collection.
However, with the web we have a collection which is so vast and so changeable that even if we
could catalogue it all, it would make little sense to do so. In response to this, we have to develop
other techniques to find the information we want.