GPC Clarkston Campus Library -- Web Page Questions and Answers

Web Page Questions and Answers

What? – What is your page about?

Is the page's content useful to my paper or project? If it's not, then find another page.
Can you understand the content? If you don't understand a web page can you use it?

Why? – Why does your web page exist, and what is the purpose of its contents?

Is your page a news site? NPR, CNN, the New York Times and BBC all produce reliable news with a lot of freely available content. A few news sites require registration.
Is your page a court decision, a piece of legislation, or some other government document?
Is your page a personal expression, diary, blog, or social network site (Facebook or MySpace)?
Is the page a scholarly article (Hint: scholarly articles usually end with a Works Cited.) ?
Is your page a journal publisher's web site? These usually only have tables of contents and NOT the full text of articles for free. Publishers charge for articles due to copyright. If you find an article you like on a publisher's site, the library can help you find it.
Does the site provide consumer information? This can include classified advertisements, a store locator, a web board etc…?
Does the site exist primarily to sell a product or service?
If you are unsure of a web page's purpose, what should you do?

Who? – Who wrote and/or published your web page?

If the author is an individual, does he/she include his/her first and last name and any real world contact or work-related information?
If the author is an organization, does it include real world contact information such as a physical (mailing) address and phone number?
Is the individual or organization a person or group that you recognize?
Is the individual or organization the subject of your paper or project? If so, the web page is primary source material, which means it is a first hand account. Primary sources are very valuable.
If you are unfamiliar with the author or publisher of your web page, what should you do?

When? – How old is your web page? When did it receive its last update?

What is the copyright date?
What is the date of the "latest news" or last update?
What are the newest dates of material in the "Works Cited" if there is one?
What are the dates of the most recent blog entries if a blog is part of the site?
Do most of the links included on the site still work?
Are the images and/or hit counter all still there or have some of them broken?
Why is a page's date important?

Common Web Evaluation Issues

Advertisements – Just as with print media, a fair portion of the web is "ad supported." Usually this is not a problem unless pop-ups become annoying or it becomes hard to distinguish advertising from "real" page content.

Registrations – Quite a few sites require signups either to permit replies or to see all the material. If you like the site and visit often or want to comment, then register. Registration exists to prevent spam comments. Sites requiring registration for complete access include: the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Slashdot.com etc…

Wikipedia -- Wikipedia works well about ninty-five percent of the time and can fail spectacularly the other five percent. In a class of twenty if everybody uses Wikipedia, then one student receives wrong information. Do you want to be that one student?

Copyright – Everything is NOT on the web due to copyright. This means that most journal and magazine articles, and nearly all books published after 1923 are not available through the open web. This is why the library and the college subscribe to GALILEO databases and to Net Library for e-books.

Top Level Domains – The top level domain of a web site: whether it is a .com, .org, .us, .edu or . anything else tells you absolutely nothing about a web site's content. Colleges and universities routinely host students' and professors' personal web pages, while most other domains are for sale to any one who cares to pay a reasonable fee.

Eileen H. Kramer
June 16, 2008