Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Information Resources on the Internet

The Web is the world's biggest source of information, but unfortunately, also its biggest source of misinformation. How do you tell the difference between factual content and flawed sources? Let's watch these videos and see.

Video #1 - Evaluating a Web site






Video #2 - Establishing authoritative sources using top level domains






Once you've found reliable information, you may be asked to prepare a citation providing all the information others will need to find it themselves. Librarians preparing bibliographies, Webquests, pathfinders and other types of lists for patrons must be able to cite references, both Web and print. Let's find out how.

Video #3 - Citing a Web reference





Here are two amazing Web sites that show you, using different colored fonts for each part of the citation, exactly how to prepare citations for print and electronic sources, using APA (American Psychological Association) or MLA (Modern Language Association) style guides.

APA citation style - http://www.liu.edu/cwis/cwp/library/workshop/citapa.htm
MLA citation style - http://www.liu.edu/cwis/cwp/library/workshop/citmla.htm




Have you ever heard of Worldcat? More than 9000 libraries around the world share their databases in Worldcat, including the National libraries of countries, which have copies of all published books in the country.

Let's watch this tutorial.

Video #4






One really neat feature of Worldcat is that it provides the citations for any book listed in a variety of formats, so you can either import a whole list or just examine the citations for one book.

Video #5 - Worldcat Citations





Let's go ahead and explore Worldcat now. Once you've selected a single title in Worldcat, simply click on the citation link in the entry, and you'll get a pop-up box providing all the different styles. Remember, you'll have to enable pop-ups from this site in order to use this feature.

Worldcat - http://www.worldcat.org/




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