Library and Information Science Commons^™

Source Evaluation And Information Literacy: Findings From A Study On Science Websites, Nora J. Bird, Claire R. Mcinerney, Stewart Mohr

Communications in Information Literacy

An essential component of information literacy is the evaluation of information resources. Integral to evaluation are users' judgments about which Web sources might prove reliable when learning about a particular topic and the ones that they would choose for short term and long term use. Past Website quality studies have used research methods that involved asking participants to recall quality factors without the benefit of concurrent Web searching. Users in this study evaluated Websites during live searching on the “open”or unrestricted Web in a quasi-experimental protocol to determine the quality factors they valued and how these factors relate to gaining …