Home - Evaluating resources - Library Guides at UC Berkeley. To find out more about an author: Google the author's name or dig deeper in the library's biographical source databases. To find scholarly sources: When searching library article databases, look for a checkbox to narrow your results to Scholarly, Peer Reviewed or Peer Refereed publications.
To evaluate a source's critical reception: Check in the library's book and film review databases to get a sense of how a source was received in the popular and scholarly press. To evaluate internet sources: The internet is a great place to find both scholarly and popular sources, but it's especially important to ask questions about authorship and publication when you're evaluating online resources. If it's unclear who exactly created or published certain works online, look for About pages on the site for more information, or search for exact quotations from the text in Google (using quotation marks) to see if you can find other places where the work has been published.
Internet Detective | Home. ICYouSee Guide to Critical Thinking | Classroom Activity. Elusive Quality of Web Quality: World Wide Web Review. By Susan Barribeau Website evaluation is an ever-present concern in my line of work, reference librarianship. As a daily consumer of information from websites I have become considerably less starry- eyed about the vast quantities of information available and much more selective about quality. Nobody has time to waste on a site offering incomplete, inaccurate, outdated, or disorganized information. Today's World Wide Web consists of documents and files that constantly move, mutate, vanish, and reappear looking very different, or appear simultaneously in more than one place.
The Internet is still a frontier, and like any frontier, the rules are in flux. How to cope? The good news is that some useful Web resources that have existed for some time, and are regularly updated, offer guidance in sifting through the quantity and divining the quality. Let's look, for example, with a critical eye at a website that is a directory of women's resources: WWWomen! Worksheet for evaluating web sites.