Evaluating Web Sites - Example 1

SELECT THE LINK BELOW; THE PAGE WILL OPEN IN A NEW WINDOW SO THAT YOU CAN PERUSE IT AND REFER BACK TO THIS PAGE TO AID YOUR EVALUATION.  Other links will also open in their own windows.  Just close the windows when you are done with them.

Animal Experimentation - http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~annam/experiments.html

Source:

• What is the domain?  A college or university, as evidenced by the dot-edu.  This one is easy: Princeton.

• What does the tilde (~) tell you?  It's a personal page, not necessarily endorsed by Princeton.  We can learn more about the person by removing the file name from the end of the URL, thus: http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~annam/.  The creator of the page may have a kind heart, but does she appear to be an expert in the field?  We won't ask you to try finding "Anna Chavelle" in the library catalog of in an articles database.  She is in Google; however, it's only a link to her page.
  
  Next, if we truncate the URL further to the domain and click on it--http://www.cs.princeton.edu/--we see that it's the Princeton computer science department page.  Can you see any connection between the CS department and Anna's page?  If you click on "Faculty" on the left side of the page under "People" you will see someone (her father?) with the same last name.

Content:

• Essentially this is an emotional plea with sensational pictures.  Feelingful assertions are made which may or may not be valid.  But no objective support is provided.

• The only sources cited display similarly emotional assertions.

• There are no dates on the page, and nothing back at the person's home page (after truncation) shows a date.

• There is a great deal of information on animal rights, and on animal experimentation in particular, in OCC libraries and in articles databases (we won't repeat this information in subsequent examples--you'll just know it's there).  Once again we direct you to the catalog and to a database of articles.  But this time we have set up the searches for you to cover these topics:

  • OCC Libraries Catalog

  • Health Reference Center (If you are off-campus, you need to go to the page of Articles/Databases, enter  your library card number in the yellow box as directed, and select this same database.  Then come back to this page and select the link here.  A search on animal rights has already been set up for you using the link to Health Reference Center on this page.)

• On the web much information on these subjects, both pro and con, is available in search engines (e.g., Google) and subject directories (e.g. Infomine).