Surfing the Cyber Library

Surfing the Cyber Library: Techniques for Researching & Evaluating Web Information

Look at the rest of the URL. Is there a personal name in the address? You can often recognize a personal web site if you see a name after ~, %, or the words "users", "members", or "people" in the directory name. For example:
www.pitt.edu/~smith(Directory)/home.html

www.pitt.edu/~smith(Directory)/home.html

While there are a lot of useful and informative personal sites, using a personal web site for your research requires extra attention. You need make sure the author of the site has drawn his information from reliable information sources. If you aren't familiar with the author of the site or his credentials, you can confirm any information you pull from that site by consulting a reputable library reference resource.

The final part of a basic URL is the file name. The file name comes after the directory name, and identifies the specific file or files that make up that web page.
www.pitt.edu/~smith/home.html(File name)
If you still have doubts about the authority of the page, you can find out who administers the site by using the Network Solutions WHOIS Directory. The WHOIS Directory will tell you who the web site belongs to, and the name of the site's administrator.

The point of these steps is not to look at a URL and think “all commercial sites are bad” or “this is a personal page, so I can’t use it.” Instead, learn to look at Web addresses with a more critical eye.

12 of 22 pages

Welcome | Searching | Scanning | Evaluating | Citing

This page was last updated on August 31, 2004.