An Evaluation Instrument for Internet Web Sites.

This paper describes the creation of a comprehensive evaluation tool for reference librarians in adult service divisions to use in selecting World Wide Web sites as reference sources. Traditional evaluation criteria, endorsed and applied by librarians over the years, are not sufficient for the evaluation of today's hypermedia web site environment. An effective tool must incorporate criteria from the discipline of library and information science, and also from the disciplines of graphic design and linguistics. This study identifies, defines, and discusses the characteristics of a valuable web site. A series of evaluation forms organize and display critical criteria taken from the current literature using the methodologies of content analysis and feature analysis. Prototype testing was conducted on a selective sample of 30 Internet web sites. Modifications and refinements were made to the instrument and incorporated into an accompanying user's manual. This manual defines and discusses the benchmark criteria and explains proper implementation of the instrument in any adult reference setting. No single element such as graphics, content, or user interface determines the quality of an Internet web site. The evaluation instrument affords reviewers the opportunity to examine multimedia, content, and user-interface while providing a quantitative means of rating each respective section. The instrument was created to evaluate individual web sites, not search engines or catalog sites. Appendices comprising half the document consist of the evaluation instrument and User's Guide. (Contains 29 references.) (Author/SWC)