Slide 1
Hello again and welcome to COM 333 - Communicating Through Internet.  This is Lecture 5 -- “Evaluating the Validity of Internet Sites”.  Caveat emptor - buyer beware --browser beware, in this case.  In the Internet, everyone is a media mogul.  Anyone can write, say, or imply anything.  Well, how can you know whom to trust?  How can you know that it really is accurate?  How can you know it is who it says it is?  Who’s posting this information?  I have lots of resources on my “Evaluating Online Resources Notebook”, and as you visit that site you’ll see dozens of colleges and universities and libraries across the country, in Europe, and elsewhere, listing their approach to evaluating Internet resources.  This is always a key issue, and in fact, we’re in a period of transition in academe at this time as we look at the electronic delivery of resources and we get accustomed to those resources and to establishing the credibility of those resources in our own minds.

Slide 2
Well how do we begin?  How can we evaluate in the first place?  How do we evaluate print resources?  Well, most of us are familiar with the New York Times and the National Enquirer or the Washington Post and the Star and the Journal of Communication, I hope.  And with People Magazine.  Yet each of these has a different nuance -- certain credibility is established in certain areas with each of these publications, but we have a sense in our own mind when someone says Journal of Communication, we have a certain level of credibility, understanding, and expectation when we look at it, an article coming from that journal.  The same is true when we read an article from the National Enquirer or from the Star or from People magazine.  We’ve established in our own minds a reputation.  We’ve developed, if you will, a kind of a catalogue or a history of reliability, of balance, of fairness, of efficacy, in the case of each of these journals, and the quality and the credentials of the publishers in many cases are rather well known to us, so when we’re talking in the print realm, we’ve already established that kind of understanding as to what we can trust and what we can’t trust, what’s a specialist in a given area and what’s not.

Slide 3
Well, as we begin to evaluate these materials, we begin with certain basic principles.  Certainly the source of the material is a good place to begin.  Who owns the server or the host, which is putting this information onto the Internet?  You know, in time, these hosts and servers will be as well known to us as the print publishers are now.  And so, in time, we’ll develop this understanding and we’ll have the same knowledge and breadth and scope of knowledge of electronic publications as we do the print publications.  But right now we ask ourselves - Who owns the server?  The host?  And how do we do that?  Well, we check the domain.  You recall in our previous lecture we looked at the domain that’s at the end of the URL (the Uniform Resource Locator).  We checked the domain, we checked out the webmaster.  Perhaps we even do a search on the name of the webmaster and see if this is a credible person or perhaps if the person other than the webmaster who has put that information up on the page.  Well, where is that server or host located?  Is it at a university?  Is it at the National Lampoon?  Or the Washington Post?  Or the National Enquirer?  What kinds of links can we make to establish the kind of credibility in this case?

Slide 4
And credibility is really what it’s about.  What is the reputation of the host?  Perhaps we can do a second search on that particular host.  We can find out more information about what else they have posted on the Internet.  What else is at that domain?  We can check for the reputation among experts.  Perhaps we can email those experts for their evaluation so we can find another expert.  Let’s say the topic is the Civil War.  Well, we might know of a couple of experts in the field of the Civil War.  And so we can ask one to look at the site or ask them if they’ve even heard of that particular site or someone who has posted material on that site.  You could even send a note out on a relevant listserv.  Following this example, we could find a listserv on the Civil War, or on history in general, and we could post a question - Has anybody heard anything about this site?  Does anybody know this name?  Is anybody familiar with this kind of discussion or argument or contention?  You can also email the webmaster and ask for the credentials of the agency.  Now, I’d recommend that you do this in a friendly way.  Your email could be “Hey, I came across your site, I like it, I find it very interesting and I’m wondering if you can tell me something more about your organization or about the agency or about some of the people who are posting information at this particular web site?”

Slide 5
Well, the content.  Of course that’s why we’re mostly interested in these sites.  How accurate is the content?  We can compare it to another site, we can see if the numbers add up.  How do the numbers compare?  Is there any analogy that we can draw to some other sites?  Does it seem to be in the ballpark, so to speak?  Does it make sense in the context of the other sites?  How objective is the material?  Does it only present one side?  Or does it present more than one side?  Does it include links to alternatives?  Usually that’s a strength.  You see, if a site is only providing one point of view, perhaps there might not be a check, or a balance, if you will, on their information, and so one should look for sites in particular that include a variety of viewpoints, and generally you’ll find more credible sites will also give you links to opposing points of view and so how balanced is the site is an important question when you begin to evaluate the content at that site.

Slide 6
Quality Control - Is there any quality control at this site?  Is it peer reviewed?  You know, we talk about juried or peer reviewed publications in academe.  Those are publications in which an individual submits an article for publication and that article is then reviewed by a number of scholars in the field.  And they read the proposed article, the content for quality, for efficacy, and to make sure that it fits in well with their publication.  And so if you have a web site or someone is maintaining some quality control, you’re more likely to have more reliable information.  Also, are there any citations at that site?  Do they provide a list of resources?  Perhaps they site other print publications or testimony or individuals or scholars or researchers.  Do they list some sort of credible sources that can help lend authenticity to that which they are posting on the Internet?  Another good way of beginning to identify the quality of a website is to search for links to that URL.  That is, what other sites link to this site?  For example, do other universities link to this site as a credible source of information?  Well, how do you do that?  Well, we can go to our old friend AltaVista (remember, altavista.com) and in the search box window you can type link:www.uis.edu/~schrode -- and, for example, you can search for my home page and a number of pages that I put up (including this one which I just referred you to on evaluating web resources - they are all subdirectories of the ~schrode account), so when you put those words in, beginning with link: and then the URL, AltaVista will return a list of pages that hyperlink, in this case, to my page.  So you’ll get 70 or 80 pages that link to my pages; some of them in this country, some of them actually right at UIS, and some of them even in other countries of persons who have web pages that are linking to my page.  And so you can go to those pages and see how credible they are -- and in part because they link to my site, they’ve done a determination in their own mind of the credibility of my site.  Well, you can also post a message on the listserv.  You might find a listserv in a relevant area.  Lets say it’s the Civil War.  So you could go to a listserv of historians or a listserv on the Civil War or 19th century history and you could ask “Has anybody heard of this site?  Anybody heard of this source?  Can anyone give me any information as to the credibility of this particular site and source?”

Slide 7
Well, in just a couple of weeks, actually 3 weeks, I think, we do have a site review form due.  And the assignment for this is for you to visit ten sites on the World Wide Web.  First, of course, you have to determine the general topic for your research project for the class, and you should then use your search skills to evaluate these sites on the Internet.  Now, how will you go about this?  When you click on the link, you’ll see that it is a submission form -- it’s a form that you fill out.  First you indicate the Uniform Resource Locators at http address, and then you indicate in a short paragraph (3, 4 sentences) what is good about the site?  What’s valuable about that site?  For example, they might have very good hyperlinks to other sites or it might have very current information or it might have some good graphics or tables or data, but also indicate to me in a sentence or two what’s missing if there is anything missing from the site.  What’s not good about the site?  That could be visually -- maybe it’s difficult to read, maybe it’s poorly laid out, hard to find information.  Give me an idea of what you think is good and what you think is bad about the site, and again this is due in three weeks; you’ll see this on your syllabus.

Slide 8
Well, next week we’re going to be doing more on researching through the Internet.  Next week, we’re going to talk about print resources that are accessible through the Internet.  We have some exciting resources that are available to us as students at UIS, and I’ll be sharing with you (under our password-protected discussion group) the logon, which will let you into InfoTrack.  Now, this is a service that we purchased through the University of Illinois that will allow you to search thousands of print journals and publications and, in more than one-third of the cases, receive the full text of the article.  It’s really exciting.  It’s a great way to do that library research at home, and we also have access to a dozen or more databases through the Internet.  FirstSearch and IBIS and Ovid -- there are lots of them that we have access to that you’ll be able to use through a link that we have to our Brookens Library.  In the meantime, keep on surfing and catch me on IM.  Give me a little message, chat with me at RaySchroed at AOL Instant Messenger, or you can email me at Schroeder.ray@uis.edu, or of course give me a call at 217-206-7477.  So keep on surfing and we’ll talk to you again next week.