There are five major criteria for evaluating an informational website:

1. AUTHORITY Who sponsors the page? Can this be verified by the info given? Does it clearly state who wrote the material? Is it copyrighted?

2. ACCURACY Can the information by verified? Are there typographical errors or misspellings? Are any charts or graphs easy to read/interpret?

3. OBJECTIVITY Is the site free of advertising? If advertising is present, is it easy to differentiate from informational content?

4. CURRENCY Are there dates to indicate when written, when placed on the WWW, when the last revision was done? Do all links lead to viable web pages or have some links expired?

5. COVERAGE Can you tell if the page is complete or is still under construction? Can you tell if it is complete or is part of a larger work that is only available offline?

Other factors to consider include:

MARKET ORIENTATION -is its purpose to sell a product?

BLENDED PAGES - does it combine entertainment, info and advertising?

QUALITY OF LINKS - does it lead you to sites that are not of equal quality?

SOFTWARE REQUIRED? -is it necessary to download other software (Adobe Acrobat, for example) in order to access what is on the site?

SEARCH ENGINE PRESENT? - Can be a plus (example, leads you to all occurrences of a word, say "pediatrics", on a website), OR can be a minus if it leads you to something out of context.

INSTABILITY - Do parts of the site disappear, without being archived, after a period of time?

Adapted from: Tate, M. and Alexander, J., Teaching critical evaluation skills for world wide web resources, Computers in Libraries, 16 (10): 49-55, Nov/Dec. 1996.