Quality still matters. Even in this digital age of ubiquitous web sites, wikis, and blogs, the accuracy of information still matters. Many persons reflexively begin any research on popular sites as Google or Wikipedia --- and they invariably do retrieve stuff. Of course, their results may be a hodgepodge of credible information intermingled with inaccuracies, propaganda or downright errors. Therefore, many guidelines are available to help researchers evaluate what they find on the Internet. Two particularly useful sites are:
- Virtual Salt
- UCLA's How-To Guide on Thinking Critically about WWW Resources
Compared with inconsistent web sites, databases contain uniformly reliable information. While web sites have lots of stuff that may be unfiltered, unedited or created by just about anybody, virtually all databases provide information that has been selected, edited and reviewed by experts. Most databases also allow techniques such as Boolean searching or truncation that usually generate more relevant results. Alleghenians presently have access to more than 100 databases:
Task #1: Do a Google search on any topic of your choice.
Task #2 : Choose one relevant database and then search for the same topic.
Task #3: Create a blog post that compares and evaluates the results from both searches.
