A Guide to Finding Quality Information on the Internet (2nd ed.)

Mike Thelwall (Wolverhampton University, Wolverhampton, UK)

Journal of Documentation

ISSN: 0022-0418

Article publication date: 1 December 2002

102

Keywords

Citation

Thelwall, M. (2002), "A Guide to Finding Quality Information on the Internet (2nd ed.)", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 58 No. 6, pp. 705-706. https://doi.org/10.1108/jd.2002.58.6.705.5

Publisher

:

Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2002, MCB UP Limited


Alison Cooke’s Internet information quality book has been endorsed with the kitemark of a second edition. She is an information skills trainer with a PhD in Internet information quality issues. The first edition from 1999 was well received judging by its reviews, and this new version is completely revised and extended. Although the emphasis of the book is on the assessment of information quality, there is also a chapter on searching techniques. The overall approach is jargon‐free and eminently practical: issues are explained, with examples, and then summarised at the end in the form of a checklist. The book is very well written and is recommended both as a student text and for general Web users. As the introduction states, more experienced users would probably browse it backwards: starting with the checklists and occasionally referring to the main text.

After the introduction, the second chapter covers finding information using search engines, gateways and directories. Although informative, it is driven by quality issues and as a result misses opportunities to discuss strategies for finding particular types of information. The next chapter is the core of the book: assessing the quality of an information source. This gives a range of criteria through which to make judgements. Chapter four applies these principles to ten categories of sources, from personal home pages to FTP archives. The last chapter, new to the second edition, covers checklists, kitemarks and metadata. There is a slight medical bias in the examples, which grows stronger towards the end.

With the widespread use of the Web as an information source, knowledge of the kind of issues covered in this book is increasingly becoming a general need in society. The checklist approach may be of most relevance to librarians and Web gateway cataloguers, but should also serve as a useful teaching tool for a wider audience.

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