Can I Trust This Web Site?

Well, of course you can trust ZiefBrief; we're librarians!

But what about other sites? How can you tell if you can rely on the information they present? There are no hard-and-fast rules, but Karen G. Schneider of the Librarians' Internet Index concisely summarizes some guiding principles in Beyond Algorithms: A Librarian's Guide to Finding Web Sites You Can Trust. (Karen is the Director of the LII, and author of the personal blog Free Range Librarian.)

[Thanks to Slaw for the tip!]

If Karen’s article intrigues you, you'll find more on evaluating web sites at Genie Tyburski's Virtual Chase: Teaching Legal Professionals How To Do Research. Particularly useful is the "teaching web" Evaluating the Quality of Information on the Internet. Using a slide-show format with plenty of telling anecdotes, this teaching web covers these major topics:

• Why Information Quality Matters
• Criteria for Quality in Information
• How to Evaluate Information
• Hoaxes and Other Bad Information
• Alerting Services on Bad Information

Three accompanying checklists summarize the main points.