Website Evaluation

 Sacramento City College Library  
Online Internet Orientation		 SCC library logo
Part 2 of 4

Welcome  |  Surfing vs. Research | Better Internet Research  |  The Internet  |  Search Engines  |  Subject Directories  | Website Evaluation
 Understanding URLs  |  Using Wikipedia for Research  |  Library Databases  |  Quick Review

Evaluation tip:  You should never use a page for research without looking at a few other pages on the same website.  You should always look at other pages on the same website.

An Evaluation Example (continued)

Let's start evaluating this site by clicking on the Suggested Books link on the right side of the screen.

http://www.martinlutherking.org screenshot with Suggested Books highlighted.

An excellent way to see a bit of someone's viewpoint is to see what information they have used to prove a point.  It's sort of like judging a person based on the friends they have.

The Suggested Books Page  

 

Cover of the book My Awakening by David Duke

 If we go to the suggested books page the third book on the list is My Awakening by David Duke.  David Duke is a former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (or KKK), a white supremacist organization that believes that white people are better and more important than all other races.

Here's a quote from the blurb about the book:
"He offers compelling evidence that belief in racial equality is the modern scientific equivalent of believing that the earth is flat."
 
Based on the ideas this site is promoting, we can immediately see that it is pushing a particular ideology.  Sites that show strong bias are generally not reliable resources for research.
 

Let's do some further investigation to see who's really responsible for this website.

< Previous | Next >

Last Update January 23, 2008