 Welcome to the BC Library's core skills tutorial on evaluating Internet resources. This video will help you determine how credible a website or page is by asking questions about its authorship, purpose, and timeliness. Suppose that you are researching body image among American women and you find an interesting essay online. Begin by thinking about the author. Does the website provide information about her qualifications, her experience, or any organizations she may be affiliated with? In this case, we do not have enough information. Sometimes the website staff directory, masthead, or about page will give greater detail. Sometimes not. To get more information, try a Google search of the author's name. You may be able to find out about her qualifications from another site. It looks like Roxane Gay is well-qualified and highly respected. Information on the Internet is really neutral. Even the most trustworthy authors must decide what to include and what to exclude. Such choices reflect the author's purpose. In other words, what she is trying to accomplish with this page or site. Does the author refer approvingly to consumer products or services? If so, the text is partly promotional and may be biased. This doesn't make it necessarily inaccurate, but we should be skeptical of such texts. Does the author promote one political or social view over others? If so, this view is probably influencing the author's choices. It doesn't totally invalidate the text, but it's something to be aware of. Sometimes an entire website will have a bias. Often it is expressed in the organization's mission statement or about page. On other websites, like the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, the bias is not explicitly stated. Detecting it may require critical reading over several days or weeks. Aggregators like Yahoo News and The Daily Beast may have no clear bias at the website level, but any given article they publish may be biased. An increasingly common example is sponsored content, which obviously reflects the values of the sponsoring organization or company. Bias is not necessarily bad. Every piece of writing expresses a perspective, but it is important to recognize and acknowledge bias wherever it exists in the sources you use. It's also important to consider when a text is created. If you are researching gender bias in political campaigns, you may want to focus on the most recently published essays and articles. If the text cites other studies, does it include details about when the data was gathered and published? For other projects, older sources might be relevant. If you're studying the history of women's rights in the U.S., sources produced at the time the changes were happening could be as valuable as what scholars wrote after the fact. The Internet connects us to a wealth of information. It's best to be skeptical about that information until you find out who wrote it, why they wrote it, and when it was published. If you want help evaluating websites and pages, remember to ask a librarian. Day or night, on campus or off, help is always available.