• Check out the authors

Who are the authors of the Web page?

What gives them their expertise?

Have the authors included their credentials on the page (occupation, years of experience, position, or education) ?

Are the authors the original creators of the information? If not, have the authors identified their research methods or provided any supportive evidence for their conclusions?

Have they provided you a means to contact them?

Is the document signed?

Can you get more information about the author by linking from this page to other documents?

Was there information about the author on the page from which you linked to this one?

If you have only the author's name, try to find more information.

•Go to the home page where the document lives and search for the author's name by using an internal search engine (Find).

•Try searching for the author's name, enclosed in quotation marks, in Altavista. This may lead to other pages by the same author.

•Look for the e-mail address of the author and write him to ask for credentials.

 

•Check out the "domain" name

com. (commercial)	Not all commercial sites will try to sell you something, but they warrant a different kind of scrutiny than pages at a government site.
gov. (governmental)
org. (non-profit organization)	Non-profit organizations can be professional associations or rebellious societies or silly groups.
net. (an internet service provider)
edu. (educational)	Educational Web sites range from pages produced by university professors and sanctioned by their departments to pages produced by college students who have access to the server.
mil. (military body )
two letter code (country of origin)	Always be suspicious of an URL that includes a ~ (tilde), the word users or the word people. These are clues that this in NOT an official page--that it was probably produced by a studentor it is someone's homepage.

• Check out the material itself.

Does the information contradict something you already know or have learned from another source?

Is the information free from bias?

Is the information current? Has the page been updated recently?

What is the main purpose of the page? Is it to inform, to persuade, to sell?

Is the writing free from grammar and spelling errors? (If the person cannot write correctly, I wouldn't trust what he has to say.)

 

The parts of an URL: transfer protocol://servername.domain/directory/subdirectory/filename.filetype

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The Personal Interview:

A Research Source

Definition: Interviewing is the process by which one person seeks and gets information from others by asking a carefully developed sequence of questions.

Interviewing is an art. You cannot expect to be skilled in this art without study, practice, and experience. All your life you will be in situations which require interviewing.

l. Planning the interview

A. Set up an appointment for the interview. Estimate how much time the interview will take and tell the person upfront. Be accommodating; be concerned about the convenience of the subject and not your own.

B. Write out the questions ahead of time. Do not use questions that require a simple yes or no. Make them open ended. Develop your questions so that each logically follows the previous one.

C. Plan to do the interview AFTER you have done most of your research andhave sketched out an outline. That way you will know what you are talking about as you discuss the topic with the expert, AND you will know what specific information you need to fill in your gaps.

D. It is better to ask a few well-prepared questions than to ask many poorly prepared ones. The characteristics of well-prepared questions are...

2. Conducting the interview

A. Write notes during the interview, but do not worry about how neat they are. Use any form of shorthand that works for you. Be sure to write some ideas down as direct quotes. Do not be afraid to ask for a repeat or to check on the accuracy of a quote. This shows you are interested in accuracy and will gain you the trust of the subject (who is always worried about being misquoted.)

B. Maintain eye contact as much as possible during the interview. As you get better at this, you can write without even looking at the paper. Do not make the subject sit and wait while you laboriously record every word. Keep the talk flowing as much as possible.

C. Ask one important question at a time.

D. If questions come to mind that seem important and are related to a question just asked, be sure to ask these, too, even though they are unplanned.

3. Reporting the interview.

A. Rewrite your notes as soon as possible after the interview. You will be able to translate the scribbles and to develop the information given while it is all fresh in your mind.

B. Write a bibliography card for the interview which includes information about who you interviewed--name and credentials--as well as the date of the interview. Record individual ideas on individual notecards with appropriate slugs.

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1. Put only one note per card. You will want to sort the notes according to where they appear in the paper. Having all notes on notebook paper will make them hard to use.

2. Notes can include direct quotes, indirect quotes, statistics, or paraphrases. Never copy anything word for word unless you plan to use it as a direct quote. Do NOT cut and past notes intending to paraphrase them later. If you do, you are just putting off work and not "processing what you are learning.

3. When recording direct quotes, be sure to record the name and credentials of the speaker.

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