While researching a paper for a speech class on the latest in new ski technology, Purdue University senior Mike Piskorski came across hundreds of pages of information on the World Wide Web.
Few, he realized, contained information that he considered valid.
“I came across a lot of junk, and being an avid skier for 15 years, I knew better,” Piskorski said. “There were a lot of home pages such as `Welcome to Tom’s Ski Page’ that had basically incorrect information and opinion.”
But Piskorski found what he needed for his paper from sites that were more reliable: ski magazines and ski equipment manufacturers.
A less experienced Web surfer, however, might have decided to use the shaky information, and that trend is worrying many educators.
“The Web has become a major source for students; they tend to come in and go right for the Internet,” said Judith Pask, the undergraduate librarian and a professor of library science at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind.
“But one of the things you need to remember about the Web is that anyone can put anything out there,” said Pask, who last year helped design and teach a course on evaluating information on the World Wide Web.
“More than ever, you need to question the information found on the Web,” said Edward Warro, the dean of libraries at Loyola University Chicago.
The educators said there are a number of filters a student can use to ascertain the validity of information on the Internet.
For example, authorship–
whether it’s a person or an organization–is key, Warro said.
“You need to ask, `Is there a name there?’ ” he said. “And who is the author and what are the credentials of the author? And is the information put out by a reputable association or society? And do you have a way to reach the author with questions?”
Also, users should find out if the site is run by the author or by a Web master who has simply posted the author’s information, Warro said.
Recently, Warro helped a theater student who needed to find examples of 18th Century French living room furniture for a set and lighting class.
“The student went and used a site that was put together by another student, and it even had a name like `Bob’s Home Page,’ ” Warro said. “And Bob had no real credentials and didn’t even have a last name as far as we knew.
“Bob had put up information about furniture and theater, but it was based on his personal taste and interpretation and it was not historically accurate. It wasn’t on the mark.”
Mary Pat Radke, the instructional services librarian at Dominican University in River Forest, said she has also seen students lured to sites that weren’t appropriate for the research they were doing.
“One of my favorite examples is when we were teaching students how to write a movie review last semester,” she said. “If they went into a standard search engine, one of the first four sites that came up was a movie review site run by a 14-year-old girl. But you don’t find out that she’s 14 until you actually dig into the site a little bit.
“Not only was she not a professional, but she didn’t even have the format of a movie review down. Sophomores in college should not base their research on a 14-year-old’s opinion.”
A second tip is to use Internet guides, especially those that relate to the subject matter, Radke said.
“Those will help narrow the field quite a bit,” she said.
At Dominican University, Radke said she often directs students to the First Search and Encyclopedia Britannica Web guides, subscription databases the library pays for. These can be accessed in the library or via the library’s Web site (http://www.dom.edu/Dominican.html).
“The information found through these guides has been reviewed by editors who decide that it’s valid,” she said. “For example, First Search has an Internet Guide called NetFirst, which is put together by an on-line library consortium. What’s found here is information mostly from academic journals and databases such as Medline.”
Another example is HealthWeb (http://healthweb.org), a favorite of Pask’s for students looking for health information. “HealthWeb is a collaboration of a number of librarians who select health information they think would be important to people,” she said.
Other “gateways” recommended by Pask include http://gpo.lib.purdue.edu for government information, the Internet Public Library at http://www.ipl.org and the Librarian’s index to the Internet at http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Internetindex/.
How current the information is can also be key, educators said. It’s important that the site leads you to up-to-date links, Warro said.
Also, researchers should pay attention to the URL, the Web site’s address, educators said.
If the site ends with “.edu” or “.gov”–meaning it was produced by an educational institution or a government agency respectively–the information is probably more legitimate than a site ending with “.com” or “.net,” which are commercial sites.
“The URL can even tell you which country the information is coming from,” Pask said. ” `UK’ in the address means that it’s a page coming from the United Kingdom, which may not be information you can use.”
Students also should consider resources other than the Internet.
“Students have a tendency to come in and say, `I want to look it up on the Internet,’ and if it’s not on the Internet, they don’t want it,” Warro said. “Quite frequently there are books, journals, encyclopedias and films that are better sources for certain kinds of information.”
Another tip is to ask a librarian for help.
“Our experience can help students avoid information that’s not legitimate,” said Barbara Regan, the library media specialist for Homewood-Flossmoor High School in Flossmoor. “We’ve been working with this information a lot longer than a lot of students. And we can tell when a site may be coming from a legitimate organization but still might have a political slant to it.”
“If you’re looking for information about space and come across a NASA site, it will probably be good stuff,” Pask said. “If you’re researching the topic of abortion and come across a site by a Catholic group, there will probably be a bias to the information.”
That guidance can be especially helpful to weed out sites that are set up to deliberately mislead people searching the Web.
“You can’t depend on a Web site, even if it’s a really good-looking Web site,” Regan said.
“You may be looking up information for some issue on race relations and you may wind up at a Web site put out by a racist group,” Warro said. “But it might be disguised as something objective.”
To demonstrate to students that information can be manipulated, Pask intentionally directs students to certain sites.
For example, students in Pask’s Web searching class were asked to find out former Sen. Bob Dole’s middle name, which is Joseph. They were given links to two sites about the former presidential candidate.
“The first was a legitimate campaign site that gave accurate information about Bob Dole,” Pask said. “The second was a joke site, which parodied Dole and said his middle name was Jezebel and that his family ran the Dole Pineapple Co. But it looked official and some of the students actually fell for it.”
