Assessment

Website Assessment Tools

I carefully investigated the following website assessment tools after a preliminary cursory investigation of about forty tools, starting with the list provided by Google: http://www.google.com/Top/Reference/Education/Instructional_Technology/Evaluation/Web_Site_Evaluation/

I narrowed down my selection to the pages Evaluating Web Pages by UC Berkeley Library (http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/Evaluate.html), Evaluating Information Found on the Internet by The Sheridan Libraries at Johns Hopkins University (http://www.library.jhu.edu/researchhelp/general/evaluating/), Five Criteria for Evaluating Web Pages by Cornell University Library (http://www.library.cornell.edu/olinuris/ref/webcrit.html), and Evaluating Web Pages by Duke University Libraries (http://library.duke.edu/services/instruction/libraryguide/evalwebpages.html). I selected these because of the reputation of the educational institution and the ease of use.

The tool I will be using today is the one from Johns Hopkins because it covers the widest range of criteria, while also keeping the number of criteria to a minimum:

Authorship: Is the author a trusted source?

Publishing Body: Is the publisher a respected organization or individual?

Point of View or Bias: Does the author have an agenda?

Referral to Other Sources: Are there attributions, a bibliography, or relevant links?

Verifiability: Does the source link to published sources?

Currency: Is this information up-to-date?

- cc 2009 Jonan Donaldson

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