The Elusive Quality of Web Quality
by Susan Barribeau
Website evaluation is an ever-present concern in my line of work, reference librarianship. As a daily consumer of information from websites I have become considerably less starry- eyed about the vast quantities of information available and much more selective about quality. Nobody has time to waste on a site offering incomplete, inaccurate, outdated, or disorganized information. Today's World Wide Web consists of documents and files that constantly move, mutate, vanish, and reappear looking very different, or appear simultaneously in more than one place. The Internet is still a frontier, and like any frontier, the rules are in flux. How to cope? The good news is that some useful Web resources that have existed for some time, and are regularly updated, offer guidance in sifting through the quantity and divining the quality.
Objective evaluative criteria for websites can be organized into several general categories of importance; Carolyn Caywood (see reference below) suggests these: content, access, and design. Which of these is of primary importance is dictated not only by your specific need but by your preferred personal style of interpreting information, and the categories intertwine. Content - and its accuracy, source, tone, and timeliness - is the major consideration, but the most wonderful website in the world is useless if its access is via a machine that is too slow, logs an inordinate amount of down-time, or simply chokes. Finding useful content can also be hampered by the design of a website that looks exciting but takes you in baffling circles, leaving you uncertain about what you've found. The design may be so advanced that it crashes your browser! You might locate a Web document perfectly suited to your immediate needs, and, five minutes later, find the "same" document emanating from yet another website, with a more recent revision date and some new material or links.
Let's look, for example, with a critical eye at a website that is a directory of women's resources: WWWomen!: The Premier Search Directory for Women Online! (http://www.wwwomen.com/). Upon opening a connection to this site, I am impressed by the quick response time of the server and make a note to check again at different times of day to see whether this was a fluke or an accurate indication (response time remained fast). I also question the phrase "search directory" in the title. Directories are at best searchable; there's no such thing as a "search directory." While such a detail might be irrelevant, it can also indicate a muddying of intent that has consequences for users. It is my habit to scroll down and view the entire page for my initial reaction to the layout. Is there a clear organizational scheme? Are there conventional website features in evidence: an FAQ (answers to Frequently Asked Questions), a search engine, a table of contents, date page last updated, some way to communicate with the people behind the site? WWWomen! offers nearly all of the above right on the top page, with the exception of update information. The page itself is a table of contents for the site with a prominent search box near the top - aesthetically, the pink links make me think of Barbie (tm) but the content looks well-organized and not dominated by meaningless graphics. I am pleased to see a link for "Options" near the search box for details about search syntax. I try a search on the word "Wisconsin" and retrieve twenty-three hits, organized by the categories in which they are filed. For a quick test of site depth I follow a link for "basketball," the results of which are an impressive seven pages of links. (There was no way, however, of knowing there were seven pages of results until I had clicked through all of them - a minor quibble.)
There are two links for site information (one to "About WWWomen!" and an FAQ) and after looking at both, I wonder why one would not have sufficed. My overall impression of the site, after further exploration, is very positive. Partly this is due to familiarity, since this site is modeled strongly after the Yahoo (http://www.yahoo.com/) directory, which I have used frequently for years, and therefore I did not need to learn to navigate a new site structure. This association also made me look afresh at Yahoo as a resource for women. I found that I reevaluated its organization because, until I conducted a search and found 346 categories with "women" in their titles, I had not found women-related resources organized very well on their site. Their response time was a bit sluggish as well, but Yahoo is a popular site and such is the result of success.
In many ways you are your own best Consumer Reports (tm) regarding the Web in that your findings are always filtered through your own subjective evaluative criteria, but those criteria also can be useful in customizing existing Web evaluation guidelines and templates. The following guidelines standardize and organize some criteria for website evaluation. A basic text is Esther Grassian's "Thinking Critically About World Wide Web Resources" (http://www.library.ucla.edu/libraries/college/instruct/critical.htm). Grassian breaks out three categories under which relevant questions are listed: Content & Evaluation; Source & Date; Structure. Another guide is Carolyn Caywood's "Library Selection Criteria for WWW Resources" (http://www6.pilot.infi.net/~carolyn/criteria.html). Caywood offers a few paragraphs of introductory remarks containing links to her sources and lists questions under the three categories of: access; design; content. These examples are two of many - for links to more, try Alastair Smith's "Evaluation of information sources" (http://www.vuw.ac.nz/~agsmith/evaln/evaln.htm). This webliography is part of an excellent clearinghouse site (which emanates from Australia) devoted to finding the good stuff: the Information Quality WWW Virtual Library (http://www.ciolek.com/WWWVL-InfoQuality.html). If you prefer a more interactive medium for discussion and exchange about quality issues, there is a related electronic forum called Info-Quality-L, which is very international in scope. Email subscription information is available at the Virtual Library site mentioned immediately above.
As to the issue of information quality, academic users often require more stringent guidelines than those of a more casual user (perhaps because of this, some of the more accurate info- quality resources hail from academia). Concerns regarding origin of information, verification of authorship, and author credentials are voiced much more frequently with the Web than with print resources (at least in the academic library setting), possibly because it is so much easier, faster, and usually cheaper to publish information via a website, distributing it to a lot of people all over the world who can, in turn, add to it, comment on it, critique it, attack it, praise it, parody it, plagiarize it, change it, republish it, and organize it to suit their own needs. Not to monger unreasonable fears, but the Web is a disturbingly perfect venue for hoaxes and for the fast and wide distribution of misinformation or plagiarized material. Questions regarding authority and authenticity can require some challenging detective work.
Two well-known and longstanding (in Internet time) services that selectively list Web resources are the Scout Report (http://wwwscout.cs.wisc.edu/scout/report/index.html), an annotated weekly selection of ten to fifteen valuable new websites targeted primarily to the higher education community; and the Argus Clearinghouse (http://www.clearinghouse.net/), a collection of Internet subject guides. Both sites offer links upfront to either their selection criteria (Scout Report) or their ratings system (Clearinghouse). Neither site offers a wide range of women's material, but this can change. In both cases, the names and qualifications of the people doing the evaluating and selecting are available on the site. Some sites that purport to review and select "the best" don't overly trouble themselves to detail their criteria nor inform us of who is behind the scenes, beyond assuring us that they are "seasoned web surfers." Serious researchers have little use for "cool" as an evaluative quality.
Reference librarians are notorious for responding to a query with more queries. Every time a person asks if I consider something a reliable source, I must ask how they intend to use it. The World Wide Web is not an appropriate source for many research needs, nor is it the best. The fact that it is often the quickest, however, holds great charm. In my opinion the quality/quantity ratio of Internet-available material is improving. By keeping the basic elements of evaluation in mind - elements that consist mostly of common sense and practical analysis, regardless of print or electronic format - and adding your own personal stylistic requirements for the job at hand, you should be able to "net" some reliable research results.
[Susan Barribeau is a Reference and Electronic Resources Librarian in Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin - Madison.]
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