Searching the Internet for Music Reference

V. Evaluation

Questions to ask:

Who produced the information? What credentials does the author have?
What motivates someone to publish on the Web? (e.g., .com sites want to sell you something)
Who is the intended audience?
What is the intended coverage of the source?
How old is the information?

Technical hint for evaluating Web resources:

Truncate (cut off) the "URL" or location of the Web site to determine what computer or account the document resides on. You can also use this strategy to locate elusive web documents if the URL you have fails to connect.

         Example:    http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/chiefs/chiefs-toc-view.html
                                   ^            ^                        ^
                                   |            |                        |  
                  The server or computer        |                  The document
                                                |
                                      The directories or "folders"

By cutting off the URL after the computer name, one can determine that the server (computer) is run by the Office of the Director of Central Intelligence. The ".gov" on the end of the computer means that it is a government site.

Other domain types:
.com = commercial
.org = organization
.edu = educational institution
.net = network

Sources for Evaluation Criteria

Evaluating Internet Resources - A list of web sites on evaluation
http://web.wn.net/~usr/ricter/web/valid.html
Evaluating Quality on the Net, by Hope Tillman - Article with evaluation criteria & listing of web evaluation tools http://www.tiac.net/users/hope/findqual.html
Resource Selection and Information Evaluation (Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe)
http://alexia.lis.uiuc.edu/~janicke/Evaluate.html
Thinking Critically about World Wide Web Resources (UCLA)
http://www.library.ucla.edu/libraries/college/instruct/critical.htm
Who's the Fairest of them All, or Is the Internet an Illusion? (Laura Gayle Green, UMKC)
http://cctr.umkc.edu/user/lggreen/fairest.html
Testing the Surf: Criteria for Evaluating Internet Information Resources (article in Public-Access Computer Systems Review, Vol. 8, No. 3, 1997)
http://info.lib.uh.edu/pr/v8/n3/cont8n3.html
Evaluation and Selection of Electronic Music Materials (Laura Gayle Green, UMKC)
http://cctr.umkc.edu/user/lggreen/evalselm.htm

Exercise: Evaluate one of the following websites:

Whitehouse (?)
http://whitehouse.net
Classical Net
http://www.classical.net:80/
Classics World
http://classicalmus.com:80/

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