Other Credibility Indicators

A lot of the CARS attributes overlap -- that's OK. Use your judgment about whether a site meets enough of them and is worth using.

Some other ways to check on a site's CREDIBILITY:

• Go back a level on an address that has several forward slashes (/) to find out which organization is providing space for publishing the site. For example, if we backtrack from the site http://www.vanguard.edu/rharris/evalu8it.htm, we would be taken to the Vanguard University home page (http://www.vanguard.edu).
  
  

• Check that the sponsor or location in the URL of the site is appropriate to the material. e.g., .edu for educational or research material, .gov for government resources, .com for commercial products or commercially-sponsored sites. If it has a userid in the URL, it usually means it's a personal home page, possibly with no official sanction.
  
  

• Don't just look at the main page of each site; dig a little deeper by looking at some of the sub-pages.

*Remember -- just because an organization provides Web space does not mean that it agrees with the content.

 

Also check the following resources:

• http://www.vanguard.edu/rharris/evalu8it.htm

• http://www.iso.gmu.edu/~montecin/web-eval-sites.htm

• http://www.hu.mtu.edu/~kitalong/Workshop/evalsrc.htm

• http://pharmacy.auburn.edu/pcs/presentations/and-harperppt1/sld025.htm

• http://school.discovery.com/schrockguide/eval.html

• http://www.lib.vt.edu/research/libinst/evalbiblio.html

• http://www.ice.net/~edutech/floridaweb/evalscale.htm#evalscale

• http://www.library.cornell.edu/okuref/research/webcrit.html

• http://www.uwec.edu/Admin/Library/Guides/tencs.html

• http://lrs.ed.uiuc.edu/wp/credibility/index.html