Welcome to Internet Detective

What is Internet Detective?

Why do the tutorial?

As things stand, the Internet has no system of quality control - all of human life is there - the good, the bad and the ugly: academic journals sit next to comics; presidential speeches next to idle gossip; today's news next to yesterday's news ...

It is often left up to you, the end user, to distinguish which is which!

don't degrade your work by using poor quality information don't get caught out by citing mis-information learn how to recognise high quality information quickly and effectively improve your Internet information skills Hire the help of the Internet Detective!

Internet Detective teaches the critical evaluative skills required to assess the quality of an Internet resource. It's free, can be accessed over the WWW and has quizzes and practical exercises to lighten the learning process.

Who is the tutorial for?

• uses the Internet to support their work
• uses search engines
• wants to cite information they have found on the Internet with confidence
• wants to brush up their Internet information skills

• be aware that there is an issue of information quality on the Internet
• have learned practical tips and hints for evaluating Internet resources (eg dissecting URLs)
• have a list of quality criteria to apply to information found on the Internet
• have practical experience of evaluating electronic journals, mailing lists, subject Web sites and organisational home pages

What does the tutorial involve?

You can complete the tutorial over more than one sitting - your username will automatically take you back to the page you last visited.

On the left of your screen you will see the table of contents for the tutorial - this is hyperlinked for you to use to find your way around. The tutorial contents can be summarised as follows:

Site Map Welcome (that's where you are now!) using the tutorial - some tips and hints Issues of quality on the Internet - an introduction to the problems that can be encountered when using Internet information resources Practical steps that can be taken to evaluate quality on the Internet: purpose - defining your information needs orientation within an Internet site URLs as clues to quality types - identifying the type of resource you are looking at Quality criteria that can be used to evaluate an Internet resource, including criteria for: Content - the information itself Form - the format of the resource Process - the systems that support the integrity of the resource over time Examples that illustrate the evaluation process: the "Case of the Questionable Content" the "Case of the (Fairly) Functional Form" the "Case of the Proper Process" Try it out - examples to try that test critical skills in evaluating: electronic journals mailing lists subject-based Web sites organisational home pages Quality services - a pointer to some of the quality controlled Internet search services References Appendix a - for those interested in writing a scope policy for an Internet service Appendix b - for those interested in writing a collection management policy Appendix c - a list of country and organisational codes

There are refresher quizzes throughout the tutorial.

Who created Internet Detective?

Authors

Internet Detective uses TONIC-NG, an online tutorial delivery system developed by Tony MacDonald, Carl Vincent and Donal Hanna at Netskills, University of Newcastle, UK.

Thanks go to:

Dan Brickley, Phil Cross, Paul Hofman, Tracey Hooper, Lesly Huxley and Jasper Tredgold of the Institute for Learning and Research Technology, University of Bristol, for their creative comments and input.

Thanks also to Terry Kuny from the National Library of Canada and manager of IFLA.net for help with dissemination of the tutorial to the international library community.

Acceptable use

Any other use is prohibited without the prior permission of the copyright owner, DESIRE, contact: desire-demo@bris.ac.uk

Any feedback on the tutorial should also be sent to this email address.