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The ability to effectively cite information sources is key to both student avoidance of plagiarism and the ongoing scholarly conversation. Previous research and experience indicated that students had significant trouble distinguishing and citing various information formats when viewed online; items are often cited as websites, and citations are incomplete or contain erroneous and extraneous information. The authors investigated the prevalence of these problems at their university, seeking out common patterns in the data to determine what, if any, information literacy objectives may be useful for future studies and instructional practice.

The library website is a tool shared by all library users. It is imperative to keep this tool accessible, but accessibility guidelines are not consistently applied to all library-owned pages. As institutions that receive federal funding, libraries have a responsibility to provide accessible websites. This study examines the library websites of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) United States (US) academic libraries. The homepages of 124 libraries were checked utilizing the WAVE web accessibility tool, and an aggregate of common errors and warnings were recorded. These errors are identified and discussed, and techniques for fixing these errors are provided.